(AP Photo / Henny Ray Abrams)

Wall Street Journal, Sept. 29. 2008, re: the media's unfair coverage of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin:

From her campaign's perspective, Gov. Palin isn't getting media attention for her contributions. For example, with foreign leaders last week [at the United Nations], she had detailed conversations about the national-security and global implications of the energy crisis, one adviser said.

Stumper, Sept. 23, 2008, re: Palin's visit to the UN:

Originally, the McCain campaign indicated that two editorial journalists--Elizabeth Holmes of the Wall Street Journal and CNN embed Peter Hamby--would be allowed to attend the so-called “pool sprays” before Palin’s conclaves, which are basically "glorified photo opportunities during which journalists can snap photos and film footage and–if they’re lucky–shout a question or two at Palin"... But an hour before the events, the McCain campaign decided to bar both Holmes and Hamby, claiming that the sprays were appropriate only for photographers and videographers because "there were not going to be questions or statements."... Ultimately, Team McCain allowed CNN to cover the spray for all of 29 seconds--but only after the cable channel refused to send its cameras. Without CNN in the room, none of the networks would've received video footage, so the McCain campaign had to relent. Otherwise, it would've faced a total TV blackout. As for Holmes, she was out of luck--as was the print pool relying on her report.

Why won't the Eastern media elite ever report the good news?

UPDATE, 5:27 p.m.: I see that Noam Scheiber is asking the same question. Great minds...

Breaking news! John McCain and Barack Obama agree--at least in theory.

In response to the surprising collapse yesterday afternoon on Capitol Hill of the Bush Administration's $700 billion plan to bailout the imploding financial industry, both McCain and Obama called for--wait for it--"bipartisanship." Speaking this morning at an economic roundtable in Des Moines, Iowa, McCain bemoaned "the lack of resolve and bipartisan good will among members of both parties to fix this problem," reminding legislators that "bipartisanship is a tough thing--never more so when you’re trying to take necessary but publicly unpopular action." Meanwhile, Obama told supporters in Reno, Nev. that "while there is plenty of blame to go around...now is the moment for us to come together and put the fire out." What's more, both candidates floated the exact same proposal--increasing the federal deposit insurance cap from $100,000 to $250,000--as a way to make the package more palatable to wary House Republicans. So helpful!

The only problem? Despite all the bipartisan blather, both candidates have actually spent the past 24 hours jockeying for partisan advantage--especially on the airwaves. The point, of course, is to appear "above the fray" without sacrificing any possible political advantage.

Given that not all of you live in swing states, we thought it'd be worthwhile to harness the power of YouTube and bring the mudslinging to a computer screen near you.

McCain's hypocrisy has been more blatant than Obama's. First, McCain debated himself yesterday on the proper response to the bailout failure, denouncing the blame game precisely one sentence after (ahem) blaming Obama. "Sen. Obama and his allies in Congress infused unnecessary partisanship into the process," he said. "Now is not the time to fix the blame, it's time to fix the problem." The trend continued today. A mere 16 minutes after McCain again extolled the virtues of bipartisanship in Iowa, his campaign sent out a new ad, "Rein," that blames the financial meltdown solely on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and claims that "Mr. Obama was notably silent" when McCain pushed for stronger regulation of the mortgage giants. Bill Clinton even makes an unhelpful cameo:

But today's weirdest anti-Obama spot came from the RNC. As McCain took to television to urge the plan's passage and ask that it be referred to a "rescue" rather a "bailout," the GOP decided release an ad... attacking the same plan that McCain so ardently supports. "Wall Street squanders our money and Washington is forced to bail them out with--you guessed it--our money," says the announcer. "Can it get any worse?" The answer, according to the ad: yes it can--as long as America elects Barack Obama, whose "plan... will make the problem worse." Call it a twofer: contradicting McCain's ban on partisanship and his position on the bailout. All in one fell swoop:

Lest the day end on that ambivalent note, however, the McCain has just released yet another ad attacking Obama. This one, called "Strong," slams the Senator for saying yesterday that "we've got the long-term fundamentals that will really make sure this economy grows" after spending a week or so flogging McCain's infamous "the fundamentals of the economy are strong" remark for his own political advantage. Its conclusion doesn't exactly strike a bipartisan note: "Obama's a hypocrite." (Unfortunately for McCain, Obama was referring to the "long-term fundamentals" of his own economic plan--not the fundamentals of the economy itself.) Watch it and weep:

Obama, for his part, is no angel--even if he hasn't proven to be as aggressively hypocritical as McCain. In response to the RNC ad, Obama spox Bill Burton chastised "John McCain’s party" for "demagogu[ing] a rescue plan that he supports in order to score cheap political points." That was appropriate. But Burton proceeded to ratchet up the rancor for no particular reason, implying that McCain is a "dishonest and dishonorable" character who no longer puts "country first"--even though the McCain camp had no involvement with the ad in question, which was produced by the RNC's independent expenditure wing. Meanwhile, Obama communications director Robert Gibbs, appearing today on MSNBC's Morning Joe, called McCain's reaction to the crisis "erratic" and likened him to an unsteady driver--a not-so-subtle dig at the Republican nominee's age. "This guy zigzags," Gibbs said. "Look, if he's driving a car, get off the sidewalk." Finally, Obama himself points a finger squarely at the GOP in "Same Path," his latest TV spot. "The old trickle-down theory has failed us," he says, going on to catalog its alleged failures. The ad is largely substantive--a sober two-minute synopsis of Obama's economic plan. Still, its secondary message--that Republicans alone are responsible for the current crisis--contradicts the candidate's claim, voiced this morning in Reno, that now is not the "time to punish those who set this fire." Never mind that Democrats--bipartisanship alert!--are to blame as well. 

Do I expect Obama and McCain to resist poking each other for partisan advantage at a time like this? Of course not. But the next time they reach for their shivs, they could spare us the bipartisan boilerplate. With 35 days until Nov. 4, most voters are smart enough to realize that politics comes first.

Expertinent is a regular Stumper column featuring interviews with experts on the news of the day.

By Mary Charmichael

Barack Obama and John McCain have put forth radical—and radically different—proposals to change the way Americans do, or don't, get health insurance. Is it really possible to make sure everyone's covered? Are the candidates even trying for that? And what lessons can we learn from Massachusetts, which has embarked on its own experiment with universal health care? NEWSWEEK's Mary Carmichael spoke with Katherine Swartz, a professor of health policy and economics at Harvard who studies insurance and recently published an in-depth analysis of the McCain plan:

CARMICHAEL: McCain wants to take away the tax break workers get on health insurance at their jobs, and instead give people who buy their own insurance $2,500 in tax credits. Families would get $5,000. What do you make of this idea?
SWARTZ: The positive part is that it would reduce favoritism in the tax system. If you're unemployed, or if you're with a small employer who doesn't provide health insurance, you don't get any special treatment [taxwise] on insurance now. The bad part is that the tax credit could make it harder for low-income people to get insured. In the current system, a lot of low-income people with jobs are getting insurance they could never afford on their own.

The credit is supposed to help.
But you have to purchase health insurance to get the tax credit, and low-income people still may not be able to do that. For a family, insurance premiums in the nongroup markets are typically above $700 a month, and that's with a deductible of at least $5,000. We're talking $8,400 a year in premium payments, but the tax credit is only for $5,000. You still have to pay $3,400, plus the deductible, before the insurance covers medical expenses. Also, the type of coverage on the individual market typically does not cover as many services as group policies. If you buy your own policy, when you get sick, you are going to pay more out of pocket.

Can you explain McCain's plan to help out people with previously existing conditions by expanding "high-risk pools"?
We've had state-sponsored high-risk pools for several decades, but they cover fewer than 200,000 people. They were set up so insurance companies could essentially cede people who they predicted would have very high health-care costs. At one point McCain said he would subsidize high-risk pools with between $7 billion and $10 billion a year. That would cover maybe 3 million people, which is not much of a dent in the 47 million people without insurance now.

How many people would be insured under McCain's proposals, compared to today?
My colleagues and I have predicted that around 21 million people in the first year would lose access to health insurance because their employers would stop offering it. About 21 million higher-income people would take the tax credits and buy their own insurance. So it would be a wash in the first year. We worry that within five years, more employers would stop offering insurance, and we'd end up with more people uninsured than there are now.

Now let's look at Obama's plan. What exactly is an insurance exchange?
The one he's proposing looks a lot like the Health Connector we have in Massachusetts. It acts as a clearinghouse where people can buy insurance policies that are essentially given the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval by the state. In the Obama plan, there's a minimum set of benefits every plan has to offer, and if your income is below some threshold yet to be specified, you would get a subsidy. Small businesses could also use this exchange to provide health insurance. This has worked very well in Massachusetts.

And his national health plan?
It's basically one more choice offered in the exchange. It sets a floor for what kinds of services the other plans would have to offer. Here's where we have to start thinking about the total cost. If the national plan is quite generous in terms of services covered, the proposal's cost will be more than the campaign is estimating.

In Massachusetts, costs have already gotten out of control.
Costs are higher than expected, but that's partly because the original projections underestimated the number of uninsured people who were eligible for subsidies. It's also partly because health-care costs are rising—and that's the case everywhere.

Obama would also require insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions. Wouldn't insurers raise premiums?
Yes, premiums may be higher. I think people need to consider the alternative—if patients are closed off from coverage, they still go to the ER, and we all pay for that.

Does the Obama plan actually provide universal coverage?
No. It requires that children be covered, but there's no mandate for other individuals. Some adults would continue to be uninsured—roughly 6 percent of the nonelderly, compared with 17 percent now, so many more people would have insurance than do now.

Obama's plan is very ambitious. How on earth can we pay for it?
Given the federal deficit, that's a problem for both plans. McCain's plan is not cheap either. I think it will be hard for either candidate to do much in the next few years.

READ THE REST HERE.

The current Real Clear Politics electoral map reflects the latest polls; it is not a prediction of the outcome

Forget the impending financial apocalypse for a second. Who the heck is winning this thing?

The last time we asked that question, the answer didn't bode particularly well for Barack Obama. It was Sept. 15, and John McCain was still enjoying his post-convention bounce. Although Obama held a slight, 273-265 lead on the electoral map, I wrote, "the Red States had gotten redder--and the Blue States had gotten purpler" since the Democrats left Denver. What's more, McCain had an "advantage in the [Real Clear Politics] average [of national surveys]--his first since Hillary Clinton hung up her spurs."

"What the last week of polling has shown beyond any doubt," I concluded, "is that McCain's successful convention and shocking choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate have shifted the map ever so slightly to the right, transforming a landscape that favored Obama into a landscape that favors, well, no one."

Not anymore.

It's been two weeks since we last surveyed the state of play--but for McCain it's probably felt more like an eternity. First, the Wall Street meltdown shifted the spotlight to a subject (the economy) that voters typically trust Democrats to deal with--and McCain's controversial response did little to close the gap. According to the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, for example, 64 percent of likely voters said they're either very or somewhat confident that Obama would "make the right decisions" on the econony, compared to only 55 percent for McCain (his "not confident" rating: 45 percent). Meanwhile, Palin's approval ratings have plummeted after a series of shaky interviews from 60 percent or more (circa St. Paul) to less than 50 percent today, as her disapproval ratings have crept up near the 40 percent mark. Overlaid upon the immutable anti-Republican contours of the race--three-quarters of voters say the country is on the wrong track; Democrats typically hold a dozen-point advantage in generic Congressional polling--McCain's dodgy fortnight has boosted Obama to his most commanding lead since the general election began in earnest.

In other word, Obama is winning.

Let's look at the numbers. From the end of the primary season on June 3 until the shortly before the start of the Democratic Convention late last month, the Real Clear Politics average--a blend of the most recent half dozen or so national match-ups between Obama and McCain--told an essentially static story: despite never breaking the magical 50 percent mark, Obama led McCain by a steady three to six points for months. But two back-to-back conventions--which typically mark the point when the public begins to pay attention--scrambled those jets, and by Sept. 8, McCain was ahead in the RCP round-up by about three points (48.3 to 45.4). That would be his high-water mark. Starting on Sept. 15, McCain's average has slipped four points (from 47 to 43 percent). Meanwhile, Obama has made mirror-image gains, climbing from a low point of 44.7 percent to today's high of 48. Not counting his artifical post-Denver spike, Obama's current average national lead over McCain (about five points) and level of support (48 percent) are his most robust since the dog days of mid-July. No national poll taken since Sept. 22--with the exception of one flawed outlier--shows Obama with anything less than a five-point lead. Four soundings since Sept. 19 put his support over the magical 50 percent mark. 

But as every political junkie knows, presidential elections are fought on a state-by-state basis--not in the national polls. So what's happening on the ground? Much of the map has not changed since we last checked in: Obama is still winning every state he was winning on Sept. 15, and McCain still leads in most of his old, familiar territory as well. That said, there have been a few significant shifts over the past two weeks--and all of them favor Obama.

First, two states that preferred McCain last time around--Virginia and North Carolina--have gone from red to blue. Virginia is no surprise. A prime Obama pick-off possibility, it has switched sides a whopping seven times this cycle, and neither candidate has ever led there by more than three points. Still, it's significant that Obama now holds his largest average advantage of the year--a still-slim 1.4 percent. North Carolina is more surprising. On Sept. 15, McCain was clobbering Obama 52 percent to 41 percent in the RCP average. But over the past two weeks, a pair of surveys--PPP and Rasmussen--have given him a two-point edge in their latest soundings; other polls show a sudden tie. As a result, Obama now leads in North Carolina by a razor-thin 0.7 percent margin. Of course, the Illinois senator is still a longshot in Tar Heel country. That said, the GOP doesn't want to be defending a state George W. Bush won by 13 points.

The second development may be even more troubling for McCain. According to RCP, every single blue state on the Arizona's target list has become bluer since the middle of the month. On Sept 17, McCain trailed Obama by a mere 2.7 percent in Wisconsin. But the two polls released since then--Research 2000 and Quinnipiac--show Obama leading by a solid six and seven points, respectively. Minnesota is a similar story: a 1.3 percent average gap on Sept. 17 has since doubled, and the only survey (Rasmussen) taken entirely since that date puts Obama up by eight, 52-44. Meanwhile, Obama's average lead in Pennsylvania has increased from 1.3 percent to 5.5 percent over the same period of time, and his advantage in Michigan--McCain's top target--has ballooned from two points to more than six. When fitted with the final piece in the puzzle--growing Obama leads the Bush states of Iowa (9.2 percent), New Mexico (6.0 percent) and Colorado (5.0 percent)--it's hard to see how McCain reaches 270 electoral votes. Unless, of course, something changes--which it undoubtedly will. 

As it stands now, McCain has fewer plausible paths to victory. To win, Obama needs only to retain to Kerry's 251 electoral votes and flip Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado--all three of which he currently leads by an average of five points or more. What's more, if Colorado slips away, Obama could still pick off Virginia, Ohio (where McCain leads by a mere 1.2 percent on average) or Florida (where McCain's average advantage has plummeted since mid-month from more than six points to less than one). McCain, on the other hand, needs to win a big Kerry state like Michigan or Pennsylvania while retaining BOTH Colorado and Virginia; if he loses either, he'll be forced to poach even more property from the Democratic column. That would be a daunting task. According to RCP, Obama would win 301 to 237 if the election were held today.

Does this mean that McCain is toast? Hardly. As September has shown, support for the candidates can fluctuate wildly in response to events, and there's still time remaining on the clock for a comeback. Obama could still lose--easily. But it's impossible to ignore the fact that the Arizona senator now faces a steeper climb than ever before--with fewer days left for climbing.  As the New Republic's John Judis has pointed out, "since 1960, Gallup’s [Oct. 1] tracking poll registered the winner in the popular vote (including Al Gore in 2000), eleven of twelve times." Usually the race narrows somewhat at the end, but "in six of th[o]se elections--1960, 1964, 1976, 1984, 1988 and 2000--the final margin was different from the Oct. 1 polling results by less than three percentage points."

Which is why Obamans should be heartened by the latest stats from Gallup: Obama 50, McCain 42. On Election Day, the Bradley Effect--overstated support for black candidates--may cost Obama two or three points at the polls. Undersampled cell-phone voters and increased black and youth turnout may boost him by the same amount--or more. But either way, the fact remains: Obama merely needs to maintain altitude between now and Nov. 4. McCain needs to bring him down.

UPDATE, Oct. 1: The RCP map has shifted yet again. Thanks to new polls from Quinnipiac showing Obama ahead in Florida and Ohio by the shocking margins of 51-43 and 50-42, respectively, the Illinois senator now holds average polling leads in both Bush states, giving him an additional 48 electoral votes. Here's the new RCP landscape:

Does this mean Obama will win Florida and Ohio? Not at all. These polls could be outliers; things could change. And as Gawker's Peter Feld notes, much of "McCain's [national] support [has] gone... to undecided, not to Obama. With Barack at just around 50, there is still — barely — room for McCain to bounce back." That said, the new Quinnipiac stats do show that the Illinois senator is well-positioned to compete for the two most important electoral prizes. Which underscores the key dynamic of the current map: right now, Obama simply has far more paths to 270 than McCain.
 

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

IN BAILOUT VOTE, A LEADERSHIP BREAKDOWN
(Jackie Calmes, New York Times)
The collapse of the proposed rescue plan for the teetering financial system was the product of a larger failure — of political leadership in Washington — at a moment when the world was looking to the United States to contain the cascading economic crisis. From the White House to Congress to the presidential campaign trail, the principal players did not rally the votes they needed in the House. They appeared not to comprehend or address in a convincing way an intense strain of opposition to the deal among voters. They allowed partisan politics to flare at sensitive moments... While there were lawmakers who opposed the package on the merits, with Election Day just five weeks away, substantial numbers decided that to favor the bill would be to imperil their own political futures. And once the vote was under way and so few Republicans were voting aye, Democrats were disinclined to force more of their members to help pass the unpopular plan.

AN APPEAL AND A BLAME GAME
(Michael D. Shear and Dan Balz)
Reacting to the House's defeat of a $700 billion economic rescue proposal Monday, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain called on Congress to pass a new bill and then sought to blame each other for the deadlock on Capitol Hill. McCain found himself in a particularly awkward position after bragging about his role in building a coalition behind the rescue package yesterday morning -- hours before it was defeated... The repercussions for the presidential campaign are uncertain and potentially dramatic as both candidates search for the right way to navigate the most severe economic crisis in decades just five weeks before Election Day. Aides in both camps said the candidates immediately called Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and others, but neither McCain nor Obama announced plans to return to Washington... Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University, said McCain would feel the fallout over the House's rejection of the measure far more than Obama. "There's nothing worse than prematurely claiming victory and then finding you've been handed a defeat," Baker said. "It's a sign of the impulsiveness that he's often been accused of." McCain's political situation is complicated by disarray in the Republican Party. The split between Senate Republicans and President Bush, both of whom supported the plan, and House Republicans, who largely opposed it, make McCain's effort at trying to show leadership over his party all the more difficult.

REVOLT OF THE NIHILISTS
(David Brooks, New York Times)
The 228 who voted no... did the momentarily popular thing, and if the country slides into a deep recession, they will have the time and leisure to watch public opinion shift against them. House Republicans led the way and will get most of the blame. It has been interesting to watch them on their single-minded mission to destroy the Republican Party. Not long ago, they led an anti-immigration crusade that drove away Hispanic support. Then, too, they listened to the loudest and angriest voices in their party, oblivious to the complicated anxieties that lurk in most American minds. Now they have once again confused talk radio with reality. If this economy slides, they will go down in history as the Smoot-Hawleys of the 21st century. With this vote, they’ve taken responsibility for this economy, and they will be held accountable. The short-term blows will fall on John McCain, the long-term stress on the existence of the G.O.P. as we know it. I’ve spoken with several House Republicans over the past few days and most admirably believe in free-market principles. What’s sad is that they still think it’s 1984. They still think the biggest threat comes from socialism and Walter Mondale liberalism. They seem not to have noticed how global capital flows have transformed our political economy.

A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE (WHAT WE HAVE HERE)
(Marc Ambinder, The Atlantic)
This was and wasn't a partisan failure. Majority Leader Hoyer and Finance Committee chairman Frank, and Minority Leader Boehner were statesmanlike before the vote. Speaker Pelosi gave a partisan speech at the wrong time; it's indeed possible that it cost her 15 votes. Still, if those Republicans had been of stronger backbones and more nimble minds -- and more mature than Pelosi, who, let's call it, gave a relatively tame, generic partisan speech -- the bill would have passed. Those Republicans were looking for an excuse, and Pelosi gave it to them. It shouldn't matter what Pelosi says; the future of the Republican was at stake... Neither presidential candidate took a firm position, although one of the candidates riskily suspended his campaign and intervened, without intervening.  That intervention failed; he is now blaming his opponent and Nancy Pelosi via a spokesman and bemoaning the gridlock in Washington with his own lips. Neither candidate really explained the trade-offs to the American people.  There was something pernicious, in a way, in both candidates' failure to answer Jim Lehrer's simple question: what will the trade-offs be in January? What, of all the things you've promised, will you not be able to accomplish? As president, both candidates will rely on the power of the bully pulplit to rally the country, and yet neither candidate has distinguished themselves during the worst financial crisis in the country's recent history.

TO SAVE CAPITALISM
(Rich Lowry, National Review)
What now? If nothing passes and a crash comes, Republicans risk getting tagged for the blame for a long time to come. The vote is a blow to John McCain, who had so dramatically “suspended” his campaign to return to DC and broker a deal. His campaign had explained his role as bringing to the table and coaxing along House Republicans, whose revolt now makes him look ineffectual. Yet the bill will likely be revived — and deserves to be. The phrase the “real” economy has become a hallmark of this debate, implicitly contrasted with the “fake” economy of the financial world. McCain talks of the honest laboring man as the strength of America. No doubt he is, but he wants to buy a house (which requires a mortgage), not pay for everything with cash (which requires credit cards), have a job (which requires a business that is very likely dependent on loans) and buy big-ticket consumer items he can’t pay for upfront (which requires car loans, etc.). Freeze up all those sources of credit, and economic life as we know it ends... Conservatives who make so much of their knowledge of the markets would ordinarily be the ones to point this out, but they have a blind spot for the market’s failures. The financial system is subject to periodic panics that, if left to work their course, will wreak economic havoc out of all proportion to reason. They take down good institutions along with the bad.

CELEBRATING THE BAILOUT BILL'S FAILURE--AND LOOKING AHEAD
(David Cay Johnston, New Republic)
Whether you favor the $700 billion bailout or not, the House vote today should make you cheer--loudly. Why? Because the majority vote against it shows that Washington is not entirely in the service of the political donor class, by which I mean Wall Street and the corporations who rely on it for their financing. These campaign donors, a narrow slice of America, have lobbied and donated their way into a system that stacks the economic rules in their favor. But faced with as many as 200 telephone calls against the bailout for every one in favor, a lot of House members decided to listen to their constituents today instead of their campaign donors. The GOP members voted overwhelmingly against the bill, while two-thirds of the Democrats favored it. Right now you can be sure that cajoling and arm twisting is underway in an effort to persuade 16 GOP members (or perhaps a dozen Republicans and a few Democrats) to vote the public largesse for Wall Street. None of this is to say that we need, or do not need, some government intervention in the markets. Rather it is to say that the administration has failed to make its case, instead assuming that just as with the war in Iraq and the Patriot Act, it could stampede Congress into thoughtless action and terrify the public into going along.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

Over at his new "Race to the Finish" blog, my NEWSWEEK colleague Howard Fineman explains why the bailout bill collapsed--and sees a light at the end of the tunnel. Take it away, Howard:

House Minority leader John Boehner (speaking) and other House GOP leaders said Speaker Nancy Pelosi's "partisan" speech spurred defeat of the bailout bill. (Photo: Susan Walsh / AP)

It was a demonstration of democracy at its finest-or worst-depending on your point of view.

Ain't democracy grand? Infuriating, yes. Unpredictable, yes. And grand. All the Washington powers that be and all the New York money men simply could not convince the House of Representatives-"the People's House"-to swallow the Paulson Plan.

What happened? Here are a few of the forces at work:

• A new generation of Republicans, coming of age since the advent of Ronald Reagan, refused to accept this vast expansion of federal power in the markets. The new GOP is in many ways a populist one, and not amenable to the wishes of Wall Street, and not eager to give more power to Washington.
• President George W. Bush has zero credibility, even-if not especially-with his own party. He used it up in selling the war on terror. He tried to sell this measure, and the more he worked on it, the more damage he did to its prospects of passage.
• There was a mismatch between the purpose of the plan, which is to get credit flowing again, and the language and numbers of the proposal: a $700 billion "bailout" of Wall Street. Voters never were convinced that they would get any money back, and they didn't like the idea of helping a herd of rich people. As a result, the measure-to the extent anyone understood it-was wildly unpopular with the most vocal of voters.
• Democrats had their own objections-a lack of tough measures against the big boys-and in any case were not about to be the only party to vote in favor of an unpopular measure.
• The measure drew only weak support from the presidential candidates, who have their own criteria. Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama was an eager participant in the sales job.
• The rush-job nature of the entire process did not help. Call it the Iraq effect. It seemed to Democrats and Republicans alike, that a colossal measure was being crammed down their throats.
• Good old-fashioned partisanship. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave an accusatory speech at the last minute that did not help; Republican leaders such as Newt Gingrich poured his own gasoline on the fire, by lashing out against the Bush administration's plan as biased "entirely in favor of the big banks and Wall Street."
  

Now what? Well, the measure could be resurrected in a day or two. Paulson and Hill leaders could expand the bill like an accordion to win votes, one by one, on both sides of the aisle (and it won't take that many). Conservative Republicans-the core group that defeated the bill-could come back with an alternative more to their philosophical liking.

Or Congress could punt-and put the question of what, if anything, to do about the credit crisis to the American public. That would mean a full discussion of the issue and the merits of various proposals, which the two parties have yet to really make.

Doing that would require the two presidential candidates to get specific-and get real.

In other words, more democracy.

READ THE REST HERE.
 

Be careful what you wish for, Senator. You just might get it.

Speaking at a rally in Columbus, Ohio this afternoon, Republican presidential nominee John McCain defended his controversial decision to "suspend" his campaign as an example of his action-packed leadership style. “Inaction was not an option,” McCain said. “I put my campaign on hold for a couple of days last week to fight for a rescue plan that puts you and your economic security and working families first. I fought for a plan that protected taxpayers. I went to Washington last week to make sure the taxpayers of Ohio and across this great country were not left footing the bill." 

"I’ll never be a president who sits on the sidelines when this country faces a crisis,” McCain added. “ I’ll never do it. I know many of you have noticed it’s not my style to simply phone it in."

Apparently no one told him what was happening in Washington as he spoke. At 1:46 p.m. this afternoon--after a weekend of marathon negotiations and a four-hour floor debate--the House of Representatives voted to reject the Bush Administration's $700 billion bipartisan compromise package meant to rescue the financial industry. The measure needed 218 votes. It came up 13 votes short--228 to 205. The problem? A handful of the seventy-five House Republicans who had agreed to support the bill backed out at the last minute. On Wall Street, where traders were watching C-SPAN, the Dow Jones instantly fell more than 600 points.

McCain says his "suspension" was meant to help the country. Critics say it was meant to help his campaign. It now seems that he's failed by either standard.

When McCain landed in Washington Thursday morning--more than 24 hours after announcing that he had put his campaign on hold--there was a preliminary bipartisan agreement on the table. It was far from final, but it appeared to be moving along well. In fact, on Wednesday night, House Minority Leader John Boehner and Speaker Nancy Pelosi had even issued a joint statement declaring progress. But McCain's presence politicized the proceedings, and dissatisfied House Republicans used his involvement as a pretext to raise the volume of their objections. By the time McCain arrived at the White House for a key meeting with President Bush and Barack Obama, the House GOP was in full revolt. But McCain remained mostly silent. For the rest of the day, he "rarely came close to the Capitol suites and committee rooms where the talks were taking place." By 10:30 that night, negotiations had imploded.

But despite promising to boycott the debate unless Congress reached a “consensus on legislation," McCain cited "significant progress" and skipped off to Oxford on Friday morning--even though "consensus" and "legislation" seemed more distant than when he suspended his campaign. Apparently, McCain was confident that everything would work out. When he returned Saturday to Washington, he didn't visit Capitol Hill, choosing instead (in the words of top aide Mark Salter) to "do what he needs to do by phone" from the campaign's Arlington headquarters. That night, as negotiators struck a deal, he dined at a four-star restaurant. On Sunday, chief McCain strategist Steve Schmidt confidently predicted on Meet the Press that McCain had "help[ed] bring all of the parties to the table, including the House Republicans, whose votes were needed to pass this." And McCain communications director Jill Hazelbaker told FOX News this morning that the deal would not have happened "without Senator McCain."

So much, it seems, for "not phoning it in." After a weekend of dial-tone diplomacy, two-thirds of House Republicans--the same people McCain claimed to have "brought to the table"--voted against the Bush Administration's bill. (Most were at-risk representatives seeking to cover their electoral derrieres.) Meanwhile, the Democrats--whom McCain immediately tried to blame, along with Obama--delivered more votes than they promised. McCain isn't the House GOP whip; it's not his job to keep members in line. But when the bipartisan bailout compromise was on the verge of passing, he tried to claim credit--even though he did little more than politicize and possibly prolong the proceedings. McCain wanted the plan to pass, and he wanted to be responsible. (Obama made no similar claims for himself.) So now that it's been defeated, doesn't McCain--by his own standards--deserve some of the blame? For the next few days, Democrats will hammer the Arizona senator--for failing to lead his party, for "gambling" with the nation's economy, for being "erratic."  Their attacks may hurt his campaign. But the more important question--as the plunging Dow illustrates--is whether the country has been hurt in the process.

I honestly don't know which one--campaign or country--McCain meant, in his heart of hearts, to "put first" with this maneuver. But at this point, neither seems to have benefited from his behavior.  

UPDATE, 4:59 p.m.: The Dow Jones industrials close 777.68 points lower on Monday--a 6.97 percent drop, the biggest loss since 2001. Which puts the stock market below where it was on President Bush's first day in office. Meanwhile, Republicans say that Pelosi's floor speech "poisoned the outcome." Was it unproductive? Absolutely. But hurt feelings don't entitle grown men and women to endanger the stability of the world's financial markets.

UPDATE, 5:37 p.m.: Reader M.M. notes that "McCain tried, but his part is the minority. Obama’s party is in the majority. He could have used his influence to get the bill passed." It's not quite that simple. I'll pass the mic to Ambinder to explain: "For one thing, a lot of House Dems aren't thrilled with the bailout, and they need political cover from Republicans. It's an iron-clad rule of legislative politics: something this big and this risky can't go through without bipartisan support -- which is basically bipartisan CYA.  So the more House Republicans make noise, the more nervous House Democrats will be." In other words, the Democrats and Republicans made a deal before the vote to deliver a certain number of votes each. The Democrats made good on their part of the bargain; the Republicans didn't. Obama's not the issue.

The public, by the way, isn't quite opposed to the bill--whatever its merits (or lack thereof). According to today's Rasmussen poll, 33 percent of likely voters now favor the plan; 32 percent are opposed and 35 percent aren't sure. It's hardly popular, which is why at-risk pols are reluctant to vote for it. But it's not necessarily poison, either.

UPDATE, 6:06 p.m.: Landing in Iowa, McCain claims its not the the time to "affix...blame"--then promptly points his finger at Obama. "Senator Obama and his allies in Congress infused unnecessary partisanship into the process," he says. Delightful.

It's all about expectations. 

On Friday night, I wrote that "John McCain was the more effective combatant" in this year's inaugural presidential debate. A lot of commenters disagreed--some respectfully, some not so respectfully. As evidence, many cited a pair of instapolls released after the clash. CNN showed Obama winning 51 percent to 38 percent among all viewers; CBS gave him a 39-25 edge among undecideds. "As the results of the polls of THE PEOPLE showed, your conclusion that McCain won the debate... is condescending," wrote reader S.K. "You imply that the American people were too stupid to follow the logic and sophistication of Sen Obama's carefully thought out answers."

I stand by my conclusion about McCain's solid performance. My point Friday wasn't that Americans are too dumb to understand Obama's nuanced arguments. It was that by relentlessly steering the conversation to his areas of strength, McCain "did more to reinforce his message--I'm a tough leader who will cut waste and get Iraq right--than his opponent." Jay Cost over at Real Clear Politics said it best: "Obama showed up to debate. McCain showed up to say what he wanted. This meant that Obama was left debating on McCain's best topics, but McCain hardly ever debated on Obama's best topics." At first blush, I assumed this strategic advantage would help McCain "win over" more swing voters and therefore "win" the debate--despite the way he "scowled, smirked and refused to look at his rival, conveying an air of condescension that could turn off some undecideds." But after a weekend of reflection--and a harder look at some more reliable poll numbers--I think it was Obama, not McCain, who did the most to help himself in Mississippi.

The reason? Expectations--or, more specifically, the vast differences between my expectations and the expectations of a casual, low-information voter who has yet to choose between the candidates. As an associate editor and political blogger at NEWSWEEK, I've been following McCain and Obama for more than a year. I've seen each candidate speak in person on a dozen occasions. I analyze their every maneuver. But the most relevant viewers for Friday night's debate were nothing like me. They don't read blogs. They hadn't watched any of the 30 or so primary debates. And they'd probably never seen Obama or McCain speak, whether in person or on TV. For tens of millions of people, Friday was their first actual exposure to this year's crop of candidates.

My expectations for Obama were relatively realistic. I know from personal experience that he's a sensible, rational, confident member of the American political mainstream. But many casual voters, as the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder notes, probably expected to see someone a bit more radical on stage. "Think of the 'bitter' comment, his middle name, the flag pin, the Chicago connections," he notes. "Low information voters wouldn't be out of line if they had a pretty strong impression of Obama formed by these attributes." So what ended up happening, I think, is that I took the most important information conveyed on screen--that Obama is NOT a radical--for granted. I already knew that Obama would come off as smart, sober, congenial and unthreatening. But a lot of voters--many of them eminently swingable--did not. And they were duly impressed when he did. "This weird racial/ideological caricature was priced into our (campaigns, media) debate expectations," writes Ambinder. "Obama coming off as a sensible, middle of the road senator actually did him a world of good as far as the reassurance of sensibility."

The proof is in the pudding. According to a Bloomberg News/Los Angeles Times poll released Sunday, 44 percent of uncommitted viewers said Obama looked more presidential than McCain. Only 16 percent gave the Arizonan an advantage. The fact is, most voters assumed that McCain--an older, more familiar face--was "presidential" coming into the debate. He could only disappoint. Obama--or at least the mythical "Ayers-Wright Chicago Elite Radical" Obama--had a much lower bar to clear. And he cleared it with ease. This may not have surprised me, but it did surprise the people--i.e., swing voters--who actually matter.

Needless to say, this revelation doesn't bode well for McCain's campaign. It's not that McCain performed poorly on Friday. Much the opposite--it was as strong a showing as I've ever seen from him. Sure, committed Obamans will obsess over McCain's smirks, his "condescension" and his lack of eye contact, and compare him, as one particularly combative reader did, to a "100-year-old retard." But these people are irrelevant; they were voting for Obama before the debate and they're still voting for him after. Among swing voters, it's unlikely that McCain did himself any real damage. No undecided will break for Obama because McCain seemed disdainful. In fact, the Bloomberg/L.A. Times poll cited above shows that among viewers who changed their mind about whether the candidates have "the right experience to be president," the net swing toward McCain (+6 percent) was larger than the swing toward Obama (+0 percent)--which lends credence to my "more effective messaging" argument. The problem for McCain is that the debate was less about his message than Obama's image--especially among low-information swing voters. Before, McCain was hoping to convince this crucial swath of the electorate that his rival is a dangerous, radical neophyte. But Friday's face-off showed how easily they'll dismiss this caricature once they actually see Obama speak. On issue after issue, McCain said Obama "didn't understand." But on issue after issue, Obama sounded credibly presidential. If that's the dominant dynamic from now until November, McCain's going to have a tough time coming from behind on Election Day--no matter how many debates he "wins" among hacks like me.
 

In an item last Thursday about Sarah Palin's increasingly incoherent interview performances, I suggested that John McCain had mishandled his vice-presidential nominee. My take:

Palin is an unknown quantity--and by sequestering her from the press and the public, the McCain campaign seems determined to keep her that way. The result of restricting her public remarks like this, however, is that it ratchets up the importance of the few unscripted things she does say. So relatively minor errors on Russia and regulation end up attracting an outsize amount of scrutiny--and possibly reinforcing the impression that Palin is "uninformed" or "unsteady." People interested in how she performs in the presidential pressure-cooker--without a script--have only these meager scraps to go on... [The public] want[s] to see Palin show her stuff--and I have no doubt she could. But by bottling her up, McCain and Co. risk letting her gaffes define her.

Now it seems some important pro-Palin people agree. Today on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," former Massachusetts governor and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney--usually a robotically on-message surrogate for McCain--veered off the talking points to second-guess the nominee's decision to keep Palin under lock and key. "Holding Sarah Palin to just three interviews and microscopically focusing on each interview I think has been a mistake," Romney said. "I think they'd be a lot wiser to let Sarah Palin be Sarah Palin. Let her talk to the media, let her talk to people." Over at the New York Times, influential conservative columnist William Kristol agrees. "McCain needs to liberate his running mate from the former Bush aides brought in to handle her — aides who seem to have succeeded in importing to the Palin campaign the trademark defensive crouch of the Bush White House," he writes this morning. "McCain picked Sarah Palin in part because she’s a talented politician and communicator. He needs to free her to use her political talents and to communicate in her own voice." Kristol reports that McCain himself "recently expressed unhappiness with his staff’s handling of Palin" and, as a result, has "dispatched his top aides Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis" to "liberate" her.

The Kristol storyline--that the valorous McCain is now freeing poor Palin from the evil Bushies--is transparently self-serving spin. It was the campaign's brain trust of Schmidt and Davis that made the strategic decision to shelter Palin from the press and the public; their underlings--including, yes, some former Bush staffers--were merely carrying out orders by keeping her sequestered. Bush may deserve the blame for a lot of things, but Palin isn't one of them. That said, the mere fact that Kristol's sources in the campaign are suddenly pointing fingers proves that Team McCain considers its "Plan to Protect Palin" a mistake. Here's hoping, then, that the new, "liberated" nominee goes beyond casting herself as "a combative conservative" in Thursday's vice-presidential debate"--Kristol's prediction--and actually submits to the same sort of back-and-forth with the media and the masses that Barack Obama, Joe Biden and John McCain have had to endure. At this point, it's as much in her interest as it is in ours.
 

In the latest dead-tree NEWSWEEK, my colleague Jonathan Darman pens a letter to his generation. The message: "despite all the enthusiasm for Obama, you, his young supporters, have done little to ensure he'll be the kind of transformative leader you long for. Your biggest failure: you've hardly asked Obama for a thing." Actually, Darman's generation is my generation, too: he's 27; I'm 26. His essay is a smart, substantive, well-reasoned argument for why young voters--who will play a large part in any Obama win--should require more from the Illinois senator on the entitlement crisis, the national debt, global trade and climate change. I doubt any of this will happen, of course. But Darman raises an important topic for debate: if young voters fulfill their promise and actually make a difference at the polls, why shouldn't they ask for a return on their investment? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Key excerpts: 

(Jim R. Bounds / AP) 

No generation of young people, except maybe the radicalized '60s youth, has ever organized as an interest group. The problem is, on his long road to the White House, Obama has met plenty of groups who do want something from him. He has encountered senior citizens who worry about what he'll do to their Social Security checks, union members who worry he'll trade away their jobs and small businessmen who worry he'll tax them into oblivion. These people are not as enamored of him as you are and have made it clear that he has to work for their vote. He's taken their challenge, making promises to each of these old interest groups that, in the White House, he'll look out for them...

Get selfish before it's too late... If you really want to be the change you've been waiting for, start holding Obama to some of his promises to our generation. In these waning days of the campaign, ask not what you can do for Barack Obama, ask what Barack Obama can do for you.

Of course, asking is easier said than done. What exactly should you ask Obama for?

The most predictable request, and a suitable one for our earnest generation, is for Obama to do something about the entitlement crisis. Many of you know how Armageddon is coming through simple math: the retirement of the baby-boom generation means the Social Security system will have to pay out more in benefits for retired workers than it is taking in from those still in the workforce. Politicians have long paid lip service to the coming crisis (Al Gore's "lockbox," President Bush's "ownership society"), but to date, none of them has achieved a solution. Under an Obama presidency, the crisis will be on our doorstep.

In the early stages of his campaign, Obama seemed genuinely interested in addressing this problem, proposing to cover the Social Security shortfall by raising the payroll tax on high earners. In recent weeks, though, his advisers have significantly scaled back this proposal. The momentum of the modern presidency suggests that the appropriate time for a president to dare to touch the "third rail," the first year of a second administration, may be many political lifetimes away for either Obama or McCain.

The new financial crisis, however, presents a Democratic president with a unique opportunity on entitlements. Historically, Republicans have started any conversation about Social Security with a demand for partial privatization of the program. The failure of President Bush's Social Security plan, however, combined with volatility in the markets, may well lead many Republicans to conclude they cannot sell privatization politically. A concerted effort by Obama to attract attention to the problem could force Republicans to find new solutions—say, through means testing or raising the retirement age.

More immediate: ask Obama to level with our generation about the national debt. In September the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the next president will inherit a deficit of $500 billion—a record number that does not include the cost of a bailout of Wall Street. To be clear, this is debt that will be paid by our generation. Servicing the deficit will be harder for us than it was for our parents since our creditors in the world at large have less confidence in the fundamentals of our economy and our ability to pay off our debts in the long run.

Obama's economic advisers have said they are convinced that, even in light of the current financial crisis, they can address the deficit and grow the economy all while keeping the tax burden off the middle class. Many of these advisers are veterans of the Clinton administration and thus have credibility when they make such a promise. But they have no such credibility in promising they can do all these things while investing in our future. During the past 30 years, neither party has any record of spending money, outside of defense, with benefits that accrued primarily to future generations. Rather, under Reagan, both Bushes and Clinton, the government's largesse, in times of deficit and times of surplus, was used to subsidize current consumption. Here, more than anywhere, is where government has failed to deliver for our generation. It has not been a question of ideology or a question of how to do the math. It is simply a moral failure. Now is the time to ask Obama to treat you more honorably than presidents who came before.

This will no doubt prove an uncomfortable request for some of you, who know nothing kills a Democratic candidate like honest talk about taxes. Perhaps, then, you will make an arguably less dangerous, but certainly no less dramatic, request: make the case for global trade. Those of us blessed with many years ahead of us will see China, India, Brazil and Russia equal (or better) America's economic strength. Our survival in this new world will depend on our ability to be a nimble player in the global marketplace. Through nudges and winks from Obama's friends and advisers, one gets the sense that the candidate understands this reality. But during the course of the campaign, his language on trade has devolved into protectionist Democratic boilerplate. Is it too much to expect Obama to acknowledge the global reality of the future?

Perhaps most important, ask Obama to level with the nation about what seriously addressing climate change will require. Clearly the candidate's heart is in the right place; he and the Democratic leadership have said global warming will be a top priority. A realistic policy solution on carbon emissions, however, will require the next president to pull off three masterful feats: a public-information campaign to create political support, a grand congressional bargain and a muscular global agreement that includes emerging powers. Obama has not spent this campaign preparing the electorate for the notion that this problem will require a major sacrifice to cover the transitional costs of a new energy economy. He could help himself by admitting that a viable fix requires more than just biofuels, green-collar jobs and Al Gore.

I do not mean to suggest that asking questions of Obama will help him get elected. Some of them will probably hurt his chances. An Obama defeat is an outcome many of you cannot fathom and most of you would like to avoid. But if our generation fails to hold Obama to a higher standard in the final weeks of this campaign, it will most likely get what it deserves: a decidedly ordinary President Obama and a new generation's descent into cynicism. This would be a tragedy, for, in truth, there is one thing that makes our generation special. We still have the power to believe.

READ THE REST HERE. 
 

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

FOR MCCAIN, DAYS OF CHAOS, IMPROVISATION AND DRAMA
(Michael D. Shear, Washington Post)
Wednesday morning was the last straw. A group of economic advisers privately told McCain that the situation was more dire than he realized. "They basically said, 'John, you're running for president. Can't you do something?' " said one participant in the meeting. The 90 minutes inside the library was supposed to have been a formal rehearsal. Instead, there was chaos. McCain frantically dialed his Senate aides, seeking the latest on the bailout negotiations, while his top lieutenants -- Mark Salter, Rick Davis, Steve Schmidt and Charlie Black -- scrambled to engineer one of the most unprecedented moments in presidential election history: McCain's declaration that he would "suspend" his campaign and seek to delay Friday's debate.  The decision to confront the economic crisis with a dramatic gesture was vintage McCain -- bold, swaggering, surprising -- and held out the possibility of a game-changing moment as a political byproduct. But it also highlighted the differences with Barack Obama's calm and steady campaign. McCain seemed to be lurching from one strategy to the next, defensively reacting to events while trying to regain his footing on a subject that had been difficult for him.

ON BAILOUT, CANDIDATES WERE SURELY THEMSELVES
(Patrick Healy, New York Times)
Mr. McCain was by turns action-oriented and impulsive as he dive-bombed targets, while Mr. Obama was measured and cerebral and inclined to work the phones behind the scenes. Mr. McCain, who came of age in a chain-of-command culture, showed once again that he believes that individual leaders can play a catalytic role and should use the bully pulpit to push politicians. Mr. Obama, who came of age as a community organizer, showed once again that he believes several minds are better than one, and that, for all of his oratorical skill, he is wary of too much showmanship. For Republicans, Mr. McCain’s performance proved mixed, however... His decision to suspend his campaign and return to Washington even though he lacked an alternative to the bailout risked making him look impetuous in a moment of crisis. He comes out of this without an easily definable role or set of obvious results, though his top advisers said he had bought time for House Republicans to raise their own concerns... For Democrats, the episode was one more reminder that Mr. Obama was more analyzer-in-chief than firebrand — though in this case, they gave him high marks for his style. Still, given concerns among Americans about the economy, Mr. Obama risked seeming too cool and slow to exert leadership. Aides and political allies to both men agreed Sunday that perhaps no episode thus far in the campaign better demonstrated how they would approach managing problems as president.

MCCAIN READY FOR A CHANGE OF SUBJECT
(Dan Balz and Shailagh Murray, Washington Post)
In the two weeks that the Wall Street financial crisis has dominated the political debate, the presidential race has shifted from what had been essentially a dead heat to one in which Sen. Barack Obama has opened up a narrow but perceptible advantage nationally, as well as in a number of battleground states... For McCain, the danger is that previously undecided voters will become comfortable that Obama is ready to be president. The longer Obama can hold even a small lead, the more difficult it will be for McCain to reverse it, absent something unexpected happening. McCain's best hope, strategists said, is for the crisis atmosphere around Wall Street and the credit markets to lessen, allowing the campaign debate to focus on other questions as much as the economy. The agreement reached early this morning on Capitol Hill about a Wall Street relief package may help with that. Schmidt said the campaign will press two arguments as forcefully as possible in the coming days. One is that Obama is not ready to be commander in chief and that, in a time of two wars, "his policies will make the world more dangerous and America less secure." Second, he said, McCain will argue that, in a time of economic crisis, Obama will raise taxes and spending and "will make our economy worse."

UNDECIDEDS THINK IT OVER
(Douglas Belkin, Wall Street Journal)
Joe Sullivan worked his way through a cheese pizza during Friday's presidential debate, and as the candidates argued over the idea of face-to-face talks with rogue states, he couldn't help but think of his own divorce two years ago. "It's always better to communicate," said Mr. Sullivan, who is 55 years old. "It's the most important thing you can do; countries, people, doesn't matter." With much of the country clumped into red or blue states, the votes of working-class white suburbanites like Mr. Sullivan in such swing states as Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania could decide this year's election. Ohio, with its 20 electoral votes, is evenly split in the polls between Democratic Sen. Barack Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain. Sen. Obama can count on strong support from big cities. Sen. McCain is polling well in rural communities and more-distant suburbs. As many as 24% of voters in the state say they are undecided or could change their mind before the Nov. 4 election, according to a poll by the Ohio News Organization, a consortium of eight newspapers. Despite millions of dollars in TV ads and direct-mail ads flooding into the homes of Ohio voters, Mr. Sullivan's reaction to the debate highlights how the decision-making process among this bounty of voters can be quirky, personal and unpredictable.

FOR MCCAIN AND TEAM, A HOST OF TIES TO GAMBLING
(Jo Becker and Don Van Natta, Jr., New York Times)
In a room reserved for high-stakes gamblers at the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, he tossed $100 chips around a hot craps table. When the marathon session ended around 2:30 a.m., the Arizona senator and his entourage emerged with thousands of dollars in winnings. A lifelong gambler, Mr. McCain takes risks, both on and off the craps table. He was throwing dice that night not long after his failed 2000 presidential bid, in which he was skewered by the Republican Party’s evangelical base, opponents of gambling. Mr. McCain was betting at a casino he oversaw as a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, and he was doing so with the lobbyist who represents that casino, according to three associates of Mr. McCain... As factions of the ferociously competitive gambling industry have vied for an edge, they have found it advantageous to cultivate a relationship with Mr. McCain or hire someone who has one, according to an examination based on more than 70 interviews and thousands of pages of documents... In his current campaign, more than 40 fund-raisers and top advisers have lobbied or worked for an array of gambling interests — including tribal and Las Vegas casinos, lottery companies and online poker purveyors. 

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

According to the nonpartisan researchers at Factcheck.org (a NEWSWEEK partner), "McCain and Obama contradicted each other repeatedly during their first debate, and each volunteered some factual misstatements as well." Here's how the cookie crumbled:

• Obama said McCain adviser Henry Kissinger backs talks with Iran "without preconditions," but McCain disputed that. In fact, Kissinger did recently call for "high level" talks with Iran starting at the secretary of state level and said, "I do not believe that we can make conditions." After the debate the McCain campaign issued a statement quoting Kissinger as saying he didn't favor presidential talks with Iran.

• Obama denied voting for a bill that called for increased taxes on "people" making as little as $42,000 a year, as McCain accused him of doing. McCain was right, though only for single taxpayers. A married couple would have had to make $83,000 to be affected by the vote, and anyway no such increase is in Obama's tax plan.

• McCain and Obama contradicted each other on what Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen said about troop withdrawals. Mullen said a time line for withdrawal could be "very dangerous" but was not talking specifically about "Obama's plan," as McCain maintained.

• McCain tripped up on one of his signature issues - special appropriation "earmarks." He said they had "tripled in the last five years," when in fact they have decreased sharply.
  Obama claimed Iraq "has" a $79 billion surplus. It once was projected to be as high as that. It's now down to less than $60 billion.

• McCain repeated his overstated claim that the U.S. pays $700 billion a year for oil to hostile nations. Imports are running at about $536 billion this year, and a third of it comes from Canada, Mexico and the U.K.

• Obama said 95 percent of "the American people" would see a tax cut under his proposal. The actual figure is 81 percent of households.

• Obama mischaracterized an aspect of McCain's health care plan, saying "employers" would be taxed on the value of health benefits provided to workers. Employers wouldn't, but the workers would. McCain also would grant workers up to a $5,000 tax credit per family to cover health insurance.

• McCain misrepresented Obama's plan by claiming he'd be "handing the health care system over to the federal government." Obama would expand some government programs but would allow people to keep their current plans or chose from private ones, as well.

• McCain claimed Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower had drafted a letter of resignation from the Army to be sent in case the 1944 D-Day landing at Normandy turned out to be a failure. Ike prepared a letter taking responsibility, but he didn't mention resigning.

(Chip Somodevilla / AP)

If tonight's presidential face-off between Barack Obama and John McCain were held before, say, the Princeton University Debating Society, it might have been scored a tie. On points, the two contenders were evenly matched. Both spoke clearly, crisply and confidently about the major issues facing the country, rebutting his rival's attacks and launching his own assaults when necessary. Neither looked at his watch, or sighed, or forgot to remove his 5 o'clock shadow. There were no memorable gaffes--or devastating zingers--that will define the debate on cable news and, later, in the single sentence devoted to the event in our grandkids' high-school history textbooks. It was a consummately professional affair.

But alas: presidential debates aren't scored scientifically. Committed partisans may keep track of everything their guy got right. But undecided swing voters--the ones who will decide the election--don't tally up points. Instead, they link what happens on stage--in a broad, impressionistic sense--to the narratives they'd already heard about the candidates. Which means it's up to the two men performing at the podiums to reinforce the positive, preexisting story lines and disprove the negative ones. In the end, Obama supporters will say Obama won. McCain supporters will say McCain won. The question is who won over more undecideds.

Tonight, I think John McCain was the more effective combatant.

There are two reasons why. The first is that he constantly--obsessively, really--spiked his responses with small but pointed jabs at Obama that unfailingly related to subjects he (McCain) wanted to talk about, whatever the original topic of discussion. This tactic had a dual effect. First, Obama couldn't help but take the bait; he must've said "that's not true," "let me correct the record" or "I just have to respond" a dozen times over the course of the evening. Second, Obama's defensiveness immediately shifted the conversation to McCain's home turf--where it remained, often for minutes at a time.

McCain's strategy was on display from the start. Fielding a question on the current fiscal crisis--not his best area--the senator delivered a flabby, unconvincing answer. But he swiftly segued to a criticism of earmarks and "out of control spending" in Washington--a pet issue that resonates as "reform" among voters--and slammed Obama for requesting $932 million for Illinois since arriving in the Senate (a stat he repeated three or four times). Of course, earmarks only represent $18 billion in spending--a tiny sum, as Obama pointed out. But the Democrat was still forced to rebut McCain's attack. Similarly, McCain deftly transformed a question about how the Wall Street bailout would affect the next president's priorities into an assault on Obama's tax plan and hefty spending proposals, both issues that (again) tend to favor the Republican. As a result, most of the economic portion of the debate--a half-hour or so that should've played to Obama's strengths--was spent on McCain's poll-tested terrain (earmarks, spending and tax cuts) instead of Obama's (the current economic crisis). McCain pulled the same trick on foreign policy, focusing the conversation on Obama's opposition to the surge and willingness to meet with unfriendly foreign leaders. Much of what the Illinois senator said on these subjects was smart. It's just that he was reduced to an essentially reactive posture, either defending himself or agreeing with McCain's more assertive remarks over and over again. (Obama muttered the phrases "John's right" or "I agree" about a dozen times tonight; the GOP quickly cut a Web ad.) Simply put, McCain was in control.

The second thing McCain had going for him was a sort of optimism. You'd think from the previous paragraph that the Arizonan was all negativity. But that wasn't the case. Obama wanted--understandably so--to tie McCain to the catastrophes of the last eight years; McCain wanted to pretend they'd never happened. Ironically enough, this turned out to be a rhetorical advantage for the Republican. Time and again, Obama would move to lay blame for a past failure--and McCain would pivot to a better future. On the economy, Obama looked back at a "failed policy" of "shred[ding] regulations and consumer protections"; McCain looked ahead to the spending he'd cut and the people he'd hold accountable as president. On Iraq, Obama focused on how we got in; McCain focused on how we'll get out. I'm not saying Obama was wrong on the issues. His criticism of the Bush Administration's incompetence was cogent, clear and largely correct. Nor am I suggesting that McCain didn't delve into the past; he was clearly at pains to list the places he's visited and the leaders he's known. What I am arguing is that while Obama blasted Bush, McCain looked past him. Coupled with his reliance on catchy anecdotes over bullet-pointed policy positions--"defying Reagan on the Lebanon deployment, the bracelet belonging to the mother of a dead soldier, the firing of Chris Cox, the bear DNA"--this post-Bush perspective may help McCain appeal to moderates, a group that's more interested in solving problems than engaging in the partisan blame game. It was probably a matter of necessity more than anything else. But he used it to his advantage.

*The National Journal's Ron Brownstein sums it up nicely: "The fundamental tug of war in this election is the competition between Obama and McCain to frame the choice in the minds of swing voters. McCain wants them to view their choice largely in personal terms--to ask themselves: which of these two men has the experience, background and instincts I want in a president? Obama wants voters to view the choice less in personal than generic terms--he wants voters to ask which of these two men offers a direction for the country that I support. McCain Friday night was more successful than Obama at steering the discussion back to the terrain that favored him."*

McCain wasn't perfect tonight. Far from it, in fact. He scowled, smirked and refused to look at his rival, conveying an air of condescension that could turn off some undecideds. He twisted the facts in a few of his responses, including the ones on the Eisenhower letters and his Lebanon vote. He compared Obama to Bush, which is laughable. (Obama laughed.) And he seemed overeager to say that his opponent didn't "understand" the issues--despite ample evidence to the contrary.

For his part, Obama was hardly a dud. He proved himself as a sensible, studious, informed thinker--certainly a contrast to the "naive celebrity" caricature that McCain and Co. have tried to peddle to the populace. He had the best soundbite of the night. "You said it was going to be quick and easy," Obama said. "You said we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were. You were wrong. You said that we were going to be greeted as liberators. You were wrong. You said that there was no history of violence between Shiite and Sunni. And you were wrong." (Most Americans would agree.) Obama was even "presidential"--which was the only bar he really had to clear.

But ultimately I suspect that McCain did more to reinforce his message--I'm a tough leader who will cut waste and get Iraq right--than his opponent. Repetition may bore political junkies, but it helps candidates connect with casual voters--as do memorable (if corny) anecdotes. Obama relied instead on abstractions and stats. What's more, McCain outperformed low expectations set by a week of somewhat erratic behavior, including his impetuous and ineffective campaign suspension. Whether that makes any electoral difference remains to be seen. The contours of the race and the climate in the country still favor Obama, who holds a small but consistent lead in recent polls. To remake the landscape, McCain would've had to score a knockout blow. He didn't come close. The question, then, is whether he can keep delivering such solid performances from now until Nov. 4--and whether even that will be enough.

UPDATE, 12:45 p.m.: An interesting observation from the Politico's Ben Smith:

The mild consensus in the press file was that McCain won, if not in particularly dramatic fashion. The two insta-polls out -- from CBS and CNN -- found the opposite: That Obama won by a wide margin. CBS had it 39% to 25% for Obama, CNN 51% to 38%. Maybe the difference was expectations. People covering the campaigns think of Obama as a much-improved debater, and McCain as at times a weak one. McCain, by that standard, overperformed. But people tuning into the race now now think of McCain as an experienced hand, and Obama as a newcomer. Obama more than held his own, and McCain failed to expose him -- as he tried -- as out of his depth.

Damn liberal media, always out to ge--oh, wait. Never mind.

Seriously, though--it's worth remembering that reaction to a presidential debate can take awhile to crystallize, and it has as much to do with the narrative that emerges in the MSM as what actually happened on stage. My take reflects what I saw in the hall. But by Monday morning McCain's "condescension"--or some other sticky moment--may be the only thing anyone remembers. Let Spin Wars begin.

UPDATE, Sept. 27: According to the nonpartisan researchers at Factcheck.org (a NEWSWEEK partner), "McCain and Obama contradicted each other repeatedly during their first debate, and each volunteered some factual misstatements as well." For a tally of their untruths, click here.

*Updated Sept. 27
 

By Sarah Kliff 

We all know the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom.

But what exactly is a Pit Bull With Lipstick? Cranberry vodka, pineapple juice and a splash of Grenadine--or at least that's what you got when you ordered one at Slainte, a New York City bar hosting 200 or so twentysomethings gathered to watch the first presidential debate. The Lower East Side dive offered politically themed drinks (including Barack's Elite Cosmo and Biden's Commuter Cocktail). The crowd, thick with New York University grad students, engaged in drinking games ("hope," "change" and "Washington" were the key words triggering a tipple), joked ("the vodka in the pit bull is fitting since she can see Russia") and watched the candidates duke it out.

The Mets game was an option. But the line that stretched out the door by 9:30 p.m. wasn’t there for baseball, judging by the shushing that accomplished anyone who dared to talk over Obama’s comments on federal spending. The room’s Democratic bias was evident in the boos that greeted the image of John McCain and his wife, Cindy, boarding a plane--and the clapping virtually every time Obama opened his mouth. But there were a few vocal McCain supporters who made their presence known within the first 10 minutes, yelling about the Illinois senator’s lack of experience, profanities included. The booing must have scared them straight; the most gregarious of the lot remained mum for most of the next 80 minutes.

Among Obama’s most popular talking points: mention of the $10 billion spent per year in Iraq, and the mistake of going into Iraq in the first place. The crowd also loved it anytime Obama smirked when McCain had the floor.

“Oh, snap!” and “Hell, yeah!” the crowd crowed. But some at Slainte preferred to play pundit. "I hate to say it but I think McCain is winning," sighed one Obama supporter about 30 minutes in. Fifteen minutes later, this armchair quarterback’s analysis shifted slightly: "I think Obama’s throwing harder punches, but McCain is throwing more punches."

As the “Pit Bull” and “Biden” cocktails flowed, the quality of analysis tailed off, and the crowd’s attention began to wander. By 10:20, some turned their attention to the Mets’ losing effort. The consensus in the front right corner of the bar was that McCain had won ("if this is an NBA series, McCain is up 1 to 0") but that Obama had the chance to come out strong in the next two match-ups ("this debate was completely focused on Republican issues, he'll be better next time"). Others had already moved on. “Are we still doing karaoke?” one guy at the bar asked his friends. There were more debates ahead, after all, and the night was still young.

 

(Chip Somodevilla / AP) 

Hi everyone,

It's Friday night and I feel alright... because Barack Obama and John McCain are about to debate. (Yes, I just quoted from Montell Jordan.) I'll be handling the post-debate duties for NEWSWEEK tonight, so check back around 11:30 for my instanalysis. Until then, feel free to weigh in on the up and downs in the comments below. Consider it your own NEWSWEEK liveblog. Something tells me you'll have plenty to say.

This, apparently, is how we do it.  

Thanks for reading,
Andrew

Starring in the latest round of pre-debate Expectations Gaming--read Vol. 1 here and Vol. 2 here--is top Barack Obama spokesman Bill Burton. In a memo titled "Home-field advantage: John McCain," Burton goes to deliciously ludicrous lengths to create the impression that the Republican nominee's "debating skills are unparalleled... and the expectations for him tonight are sky-high" while suggesting, incidentally, that "DEBATES ARE NOT A GOOD FORMAT FOR OBAMA." The caps are his.

To prove his point, Burton gleefully quotes a series of pundits denigrating his boss. Obama’s chops are “uneven” as he has “a tendency to overintellectualize and to lecture”? Thanks, The New York Times! The Illinois senator comes across as “lifeless, aloof and windy” during debates? Awesome, Associated Press! Must be the reason, as James Fallows asserts, that Obama has never "receive[d] big acclaim after a debate." John Cougar Mellencamp never hurt so good. 

Never mind foreign policy. If only Obama can manage to give even, underintellectualized, windless answers that show him to be approachable and full of life, he might be on his way to receiving some big acclaim tonight!

Burton, I suspect, will be first in line.

FULL MEMO AFTER THE JUMP...

(Gerald Herbert / AP)

In a statement emailed to reporters at 11:24 this morning, John McCain spokesman Brian Rogers announced that the "McCain campaign is resuming all activities and the Senator will travel to the debate this afternoon."

I'm thinking of suing for whiplash.

At first, I was willing to give McCain the benefit of the doubt on his "amazing gambit." As I wrote yesterday, if he, Obama and Bush had emerged from Thursday's White House summit having ratified the fragile preliminary agreement between Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the Administration, congressional Democrats and Senate Republicans--four of the five parties necessary for consensus--I would've said "no harm, no foul." McCain may have been irrelevant, but at least he wouldn't have been a destructive force. In that case, debate away. But instead he's proven to be a bull in a china shop--or, more accurately, a bull that 1) misleadingly says the china shop is in disarray before he enters; 2) vows not to leave until he cleans up; 3) enters and shatters everything in sight; 4) blames everyone else for the damage and 5) leaves, claiming a job well done.

Here's what happened yesterday, according to the chronology I've cobbled together from news reports.

By 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday, "the House and Senate Democrats had settled their most important differences, the White House had caved on CEO pays, and the two sides were coming close to dealing with the bailout's oversight mechanism, its posture toward homeowners, and whether taxpayers would get ownership stakes in taken-over companies." As many as 40 of the 49 Senate Republicans were ready to support the bailout. House Republicans were grumbling, but without anyone to legitimate their revolt, they weren't making much noise. House Minority Leader John Boehner even issued a joint statement with Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday night declaring bipartisan progress.

Then McCain arrived, uninvited, in Washington, loudly announcing that "no consensus has developed" and that "the plan on the table will [not] pass." Emboldened, the House Republicans raised the volume of their objections, possibly to save face for McCain and create the impression that he had come to the rescue. As Boehner's top aide told the New York Times this morning, "Republicans revolted, in part, because they were chafing at what they saw as an attempt by Democrats to jam through an agreement on the bailout early Thursday and deny Mr. McCain an opportunity to participate in the agreement"--even though Bush and Senate Republicans also favored the renegotiated bailout plan.

At this point, McCain could've attempted to bring the House Republicans on board. He could've explained that government intervention was unfortunate but necessary. That would have given him cover to claim that he'd helped restore equilibrium (even if he had also helped disrupt it). But when the Arizona senator arrived at the White House summit arranged for his benefit, he "sat silently for more than 40 minutes, more observer than leader, and then offered only a vague sense of where he stood."  He did little else to forge a compromise. As the Washington Post reported, "McCain shuttled between meetings and his Senate office but rarely came close to the Capitol suites and committee rooms where the talks were taking place."

After hours of phone calls and huddles on Capitol Hill, Congressional negotiators finally gave up for the night. It was about 10:30 p.m. The bill's fate was more uncertain than it had been midweek, and the level of rancor among legislators had reached a new high. The Beltway was back at Square One--or Square Negative One. And McCain was the variable.

Then he declares "Mission Accomplished."

When suspending his campaign on Wednesday and threatening not to debate, McCain defined his goal as "achiev[ing] consensus on legislation." But at 11:24 this morning, consensus was conspicuously absent on Capitol Hill. Which meant, as the New Republic's Michael Crowley puts it, that "by McCain's original logic, the argument for staying in Washington ha[d] gotten stronger [since his arrival], not weaker." As a result, McCain's announcement that he's now flying to Ole Miss--a stark reversal from his earlier insistence on not debating unless a deal is done--only reinforces the impression that suspending his campaign was a stunt (even if it wasn't). First he'd settle for nothing short of "consensus" and "legislation." Now being "optimistic" that "significant progress" has taken place---not certain, but "optimistic"--is enough to declare victory. After insisting that it would be unpatriotic to debate before the deal was done, McCain is debating anyway--even though a deal seems more distant than when he suspended his campaign. McCain wanted to look strong and apolitical. He wound up looking weak and opportunistic instead.

In the Rogers statement, McCain goes so far as to imply that Obama's "political posturing" was the reason he left D.C.--immediately after denouncing "Washington" for "play[ing] the blame game rather than work[ing] together to find a solution." Some should get the man a mirror.

As far as how this will play, Crowley took the words right out of my mouth--so I'll just pass the mic:

In these situations I'm inclined to think most voters... will only have an impressionistic sense of what's going on. Initially I think the impression was likely to be that McCain showed leadership and took charge of the situation after a stretch when both candidates looked passive. Even if McCain parachuted in just as a deal was passing and played no role, it seemed possible that he could steal some credit. But now the low-information voter, if you will, probably has a sense that the minute McCain hit the ground everything in Washington went to hell in a familiar, absurd, system-is-broken kind of way. And now he's getting out of Dodge. Hard to see how that's a net gain for him.

Congressional negotiators could hammer out a deal before the markets close today. They could settle on a framework that has the support of House Republicans. Or this fragile situation could devolve into a protracted stalemate. Obviously, the first option is better for McCain--who will return this weekend to Washington--than the third. But given that the nominee "got out of Dodge" before the shattered china was reassembled--his stated reason, after all, for putting "politics before country" and suspending his campaign--it's hard to see why voters should give him credit for anything other than making things worse.

UPDATE, 3:34 p.m.:  Eve Fairbanks dissects "How McCain's Gambit Could Work"--and explains why it shouldn't:

[Republicans will say that] McCain understood the anti-bailout-bill sentiment outside of Washington and then gave House Republicans the political backup to buck the pressure to compromise. In a vacuum, it's an appealing populist narrative, and in a vacuum I even think it works -- witness the success of the Republicans' "we understand what the country really wants, unlike you Democrat stuffed suits" posturing on oil drilling this summer.

It doesn't work if Democrats point out -- again and again and again -- the 180 degree turn this represents from McCain's original, anti-populist rationale for going to Washington: to support the compromise and to lend his expertise at bipartisan, smoke-filled-room negotiations, not to undermine them on behalf of "the taxpayers." McCain's motivational switcheroo -- and the reporting that he passed Bush's "summit" yesterday with Paulson in silence...-- ought to cement his reputation as a chaos-creating, erratic, back-and-forth decisionmaker.

Thoughts?

Here's the full text of the extraordinarily bizarre statement just put out by McCain spokesman Brian Rogers. To me, it almost seems as if McCain is saying that he's decided to debate BECAUSE Washington wasn't reaching a bipartisan consensus--a stark reversal from his earlier insistence on not debating unless such a consensus was reached.

For my analysis of McCain's zig-zag, click here.

For Holly Bailey's report on the run-up to the announcement, click here. 

Statement By McCain Campaign On Negotiations

John McCain's decision to suspend his campaign was made in the hopes that politics could be set aside to address our economic crisis.

In response, Americans saw a familiar spectacle in Washington.  At a moment of crisis that threatened the economic security of American families, Washington played the blame game rather than work together to find a solution that would avert a collapse of financial markets without squandering hundreds of billions of taxpayers' money to bailout bankers and brokers who bet their fortunes on unsafe lending practices. 

Both parties in both houses of Congress and the administration needed to come together to find a solution that would deserve the trust of the American people.  And while there were attempts to do that, much of yesterday was spent fighting over who would get the credit for a deal and who would get the blame for failure.  There was no deal or offer yesterday that had a majority of support in Congress.  There was no deal yesterday that included adequate protections for the taxpayers.  It is not enough to cut deals behind closed doors and then try to force it on the rest of Congress -- especially when it amounts to thousands of dollars for every American family.

The difference between Barack Obama and John McCain was apparent during the White House meeting yesterday where Barack Obama's priority was political posturing in his opening monologue defending the package as it stands.  John McCain listened to all sides so he could help focus the debate on finding a bipartisan resolution that is in the interest of taxpayers and homeowners.  The Democratic interests stood together in opposition to an agreement that would accommodate additional taxpayer protections.

Senator McCain has spent the morning talking to members of the Administration, members of the Senate, and members of the House. He is optimistic that there has been significant progress toward a bipartisan agreement now that there is a framework for all parties to be represented in negotiations, including Representative Blunt as a designated negotiator for House Republicans.  The McCain campaign is resuming all activities and the Senator will travel to the debate this afternoon.  Following the debate, he will return to Washington to ensure that all voices and interests are represented in the final agreement, especially those of taxpayers and homeowners.

By Holly Bailey

What will John McCain do about the debate tonight? That's the big question this morning as the Republican nominee remains in Washington, where he's up on Capitol Hill meeting with House Republicans in hopes of hammering out a compromise on a financial bailout package. McCain, who spent much of last night holed up in his suburban Washington condo making phone calls on the issue, has said he won't debate unless there's an agreement on the table. It's politically risky move that has essentially put his fate into the hands of people who don't like him very much--and we're not just talking about Democrats.

Although the GOP has largely united behind McCain as its nominee, don't forget that many Capitol Hill Republicans, especially those in the House, have been no fans of McCain, dating back to debates on campaign finance reform, immigration and his work with the Gang of 14 on judges. Look no further than what happened yesterday at the White House, where after a private meeting with President Bush, Barack Obama and the congressional leadership of both parties, Democrats emerged and trashed McCain for injecting presidential politics into the delicate negotiating process.

"John McCain did nothing to help, and he only hurt the process," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who just days before had suggested McCain use his influence to get Republicans on board. Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Reid said, "We need, now, the Republicans to start producing some voters for us. We need the Republican nominee for president to let us know where he stands and what we should do."

McCain aides say they interpreted that as a directive for McCain to come back to Washington and take a greater role in the process; yet Reid, who has attacked McCain previously for missing important Senate votes, insisted it wasn't, issuing a statement on Wednesday that McCain coming back to DC were merely an attempt to "divert attention from his failing campaign." Last night, both sides were pointing figures at each other, with McCain aides saying that Reid had merely invited McCain into the process to attack him.

But where were McCain's Republican defenders? No Republicans who were in the White House pow-wow, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell or Rep. John Boehner, who is meeting with McCain on the Hill this morning, have come out to publicly defend McCain's role in the meeting. On background, GOP aides say neither McCain or Obama played a central role in the White House debate yesterday, but there's a big difference between sticking up for someone on background and going before reporters to publicly defend him as not being a disruptive force. Asked why Republicans weren't speaking out in support of McCain's role in the process, one McCain adviser bluntly admitted, "They don't like him very much."

Indeed, only Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of McCain's closest friends and confidant's, had his pal's back, insisting that McCain was unfairly being attacked as a scapegoat in the process. "(McCain's) leadership is to try to stop us from yelling at each other, announcing deals that don't exist, to actually talk to the House and Senate and get agreement, then to the process," Graham told NBC's Today Show this morning. "Try to create organization out of chaos. Three days ago, Harry Reid said there will be no deal without John McCain's support. Nothing happened for three days. John comes back to town. Now he's being criticized for coming back."

In some ways, it's a storyline that will fit well into McCain lore--the maverick willing to do what it takes to do the right thing. McCain has said frequently that he'd rather lose a campaign than a war. Will voters reward him for sticking around in Washington to work on the financial bailout and possibly staying away from the first major presidential debate? Under attack by the Democrats and with so few Republicans willing to defend him, it's a political risk. For now, McCain and his aides aren't talking about what might happen tonight. Reporters traveling with McCain are currently on stand-by, told to be ready to jump on his plane toward Mississippi at a moment's notice. One thing is clear: just because of pure logistics, we should know McCain's decision soon.

In the first installment of our pre-debate Expectations Game series, we focused on the transparently fulsome praise flying back and forth between the Obama and McCain camps in advance of tonight's clash at Ole Miss--the point of which, of course, was to convince the press and the public than anything short of a Cicero-level performance from their rival would represent the most abject of disappointments. But we neglectedto provide any examples of that other Expectations Game mainstay: preposterous self-deprecation. Here, then, is Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs trying to spin reporters yesterday in Washington into believing that Obama is the worst debater in the history of the world:

"Many of us have made the joke that sometimes it takes him 60 seconds for him to clear his throat. There's no doubt that the way in which a normal primary and general election debate is structured is not his strong suit... I will email you individually all your clips from the previous 22 primary debates... It's a rare thing where I agree with all my friends in the press corps. He tends to get a question, describe the problem, tell a story, give some solutions. You pray to God that isn't 45 seconds more than you've been allotted to speak."

Something tells us Gibbs will be singing a different tune in the spin room after the show.

As for McCain, he hasn't really been playing the Expectations Game much the past few days. Something about "suspending" his campaign to deal with some sort of financial crisis in Washington. Still, one could interpret McCain's whole "let's postpone the debate unless there's a deal" gambit as the ultimate example of lowering the bar. To beat expectations, all he has to do is show up.

My NEWSWEEK colleague Richard Wolffe reports on Barack Obama's preparations for tonight's (possible) presidential debate.

Ensconced this week in his hotel near Tampa, Florida, Barack Obama has spent his evenings doing something he never attempted through more than 20 debates during primary season: running full dress-rehearsals.

Holding his test runs at 9 PM, the time of night when the presidential debates are scheduled, Obama has faced off against one of his most trusted advisers, who is playing the role of John McCain. Greg Craig, the powerhouse Washington lawyer who helped run the defense in the impeachment case against President Clinton and served as a top State Department adviser, has boned up on McCain's best lines in preparation for Friday's debate. According to Obama aides involved in the debate prep, Craig has proved an effective opponent in the mock sessions, while steering clear of mimicking McCain's mannerisms.

Craig has some history as a debate foil; he played the role of President Bush during John Kerry's mock sessions four years ago. Kerry entered the debates eight points down in the Gallup poll in late September. The same poll had Kerry up by two after the second showdown—only to drop back to eight points down again after the post-debate glow faded. Those Bush-Kerry verbal jousts were decided in part by body language, as the incumbent president palpably demonstrated his frustration.

Of course, it is still unclear whether the contest Obama is gearing up for will actually come off on schedule—given the uncertain fate of  the financial bailout package now under debate on Capitol Hill, and the strategic maneuvering of his Republican rival. Obama's campaign, along with the Commission on Presidential Debates and the University of Mississippi, insist that the show will go on—whether or not McCain turns up. Late Thursday, McCain said: "I believe that it's very possible that we can get an agreement in time for me to fly to Mississippi. I understand how important this debate is and I'm very hopeful. But I also have to put the country first."...

The uncertainty over McCain's plans isn't the only variable in the equation.  Jim Lehrer of PBS, the debate moderator, has told both campaigns that the financial crisis will be part of the questioning, which was originally meant to focus solely on foreign policy. That suits both candidates, who have been cramming on the subject in between calls to Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and investors like Warren Buffett.

For their part, Obama's aides say they'll be ready—regardless of whether the Republican nominee decides to take part in the proceedings. "He's practicing his part in this," says Gibbs. "So we're prepared to take questions from Jim Lehrer with or without John McCain."

READ THE REST HERE.

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

MCCAIN LEAPS INTO A THICKET
(Adam Nagourney and Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times)
As a matter of political appearances, the day’s events succeeded most of all in raising questions about precisely why Mr. McCain had called for postponing the first debate and returned to Washington to focus on the bailout plan, and what his own views were about what should be done. Those political appearances are a key consideration for Mr. McCain less than six weeks from Election Day and at a time when some polls suggest he is losing ground against Mr. Obama, especially on handling the economy...  At the very least, Mr. McCain’s actions have shaken up the campaign and the negotiations over the bailout package. It has put him at center stage, permitted him to present himself as putting his country ahead of his campaign — a recurring theme of his candidacy — and put him on deck to, if not help orchestrate a deal, at least be associated with one. But Mr. McCain is certainly seeing the risks of making such a direct intervention. He now finds himself in the middle of an ideological war that pits conservative Republicans, loath to spending so much taxpayer money on Wall Street, against the Bush White House, which, with the support of Democrats and a sizable number of Republicans, sees a bailout package as essential to averting a potential economic disaster.

AN ELECTION ABOUT NOTHING
(Ross Douthat, The Atlantic)
So Barack Obama, who once claimed to embody sweeping, once-in-a-generation change, has ended up running a cautious, negative, and deeply generic Democratic campaign, while John McCain, who's supposedly all about honor and service and aching nobility, has offered a mix of snark, stunts, and manufactured controversies week in and week out. And the pundit class, deeply invested in the notion that the stakes in this election are stunningly, awesomely high, has responded to the fundamental dullness of the race itself with wild hyperventilation, unable to accept that this campaign just hasn't lived up to their round-the-clock hype - and that it may not even turn out to be the most important election of this decade, let alone of a generation or a lifetime.  All Presidential elections are important, of course, and they're usually important for reasons that nobody sees coming during the election itself. But given the evidence presented to date--the enormous constraints on American action abroad, a fiscal situation that more or less ensures that neither candidate's boldest ideas are likely to get off the ground, and the unimaginative, substance-averse politicking of the candidates themselves--here's good reason to think that the outcome of this election won't be nearly as transformational as many people seem to think.

THE ELECTION YOU WOULDN'T WANT TO WIN
(Gerard Baker, Times of London)
It is highly probable that that moment, the very hour that he takes office, will be the high point of his presidency. Whoever wins on November 4 will be ascending to the job at one of the most difficult times for an American chief executive in at least half a century. When the votes are counted his people might ruefully conclude that the victor is not Barack Obama or John McCain. The real winner will be Hillary Clinton, or Mitt Romney, or Mike Huckabee, or some now happily anonymous figure whose star will rise in the next four turbulent years... The bailout/rescue plan/ socialisation of the banking system--whichever you prefer--has, in effect, already rendered null and void almost everything that the presidential candidates have been proposing for the past six months. It may not end up adding a straight $700 billion to the deficit over the next couple of years--the Treasury is surely right to insist that it will get some of that money back when the bad assets acquired from banks are sold off. But it would certainly not be prudent to expect there to be any room left over for promised tax cuts, spending increases on health, education or anything else. 

TALKS IMPLODE DURING DAY OF CHAOS
(David M. Herszenhorn, Carl Hulse and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, New York Times)
The day began with an agreement that Washington hoped would end the financial crisis that has gripped the nation. It dissolved into a verbal brawl in the Cabinet Room of the White House, urgent warnings from the president and pleas from a Treasury secretary who knelt before the House speaker and appealed for her support. “If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down,” President Bush declared Thursday as he watched the $700 billion bailout package fall apart before his eyes, according to one person in the room. It was an implosion that spilled out from behind closed doors into public view in a way rarely seen in Washington. By 10:30 p.m., after another round of talks, Congressional negotiators gave up for the night and said they would try again on Friday. Left uncertain was the fate of the bailout, which the White House says is urgently needed to fix broken financial and credit markets, as well as whether the first presidential debate would go forward as planned Friday night in Mississippi. When Congressional leaders and Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, the two major party presidential candidates, trooped to the White House on Thursday afternoon, most signs pointed toward a bipartisan agreement on a grand compromise that could be accepted by all sides and signed into law by the weekend. It was intended to pump billions of dollars into the financial system, restoring liquidity and keeping credit flowing to businesses and consumers.

IS MCCAIN GOING TO DEBATE?
(Jonathan Chait, New Republic)
If McCain was really worried about missing the debate, he'd have seized on the earlier announcement to the bill on the way to passage and announced his participation in the debate. He didn't. Conclusion: I don't think there's much reason to believe he really wants to debate Friday night. What will happen? I think the next stage is a game of chicken with the networks. If the networks convincingly say that they plan to air a "debate" between Obama and an empty chair moderated by Jim Lehrer, then McCain will be on the first plane to Mississippi. But McCain will exert intense pressure on the networks not to do that. Every Republican politician and media organ will reverberate with charges of media bias, and most likely the networks will fold, and air re-runs instead. (Cable news stations might air the "debate," but that would command a tiny fraction of normal debate viewership.) So then Obama will be forced to reschedule the debate, which may well be what McCain was after all along. The alternative possibility is that Republicans are just holding up the deal, waiting for McCain's intervention to be the heroic leap rescuing the bailout from the brink of disaster. It may happen. But does McCain really want to jump back into the debate after apparently having spent so little time prepping for it?

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

When I first weighed in on John McCain's decision to "suspend" his campaign and swoop into Washington, I said that "for the moment, this is almost all upside for McCain, at least politically." One reason was that the maneuver shifted the media spotlight off of campaign manager Rick Davis's ties to Freddie Mac--then the MSM's scandale du jour--and onto potentially favorable terrain. That's still true. In the 24 hours since McCain's announcement, NEWSWEEK's indefatigable investigative ace Michael Isikoff has reported that "Davis has remained the treasurer and a corporate director of his lobbying firm this year, despite repeated statements by campaign officials that he had ended his relationship with the firm in 2006"--and no one seemed to notice. But now I'm starting to suspect that there's another beneficiary of McCain's misdirection.

Her name: Sarah Palin.

Perhaps you've heard of her? The media's monomaniacal obsession for nearly a month, the Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee seems to have slipped from the headlines somewhat in the day since McCain captured the chattering classes' attention. Which is interesting, given that it's the same day that she gave her first (mini) press conference and sat for only her second nonpartisan interview (with CBS News' Katie Couric). What's also interesting is that Palin's belated burst of accessibility was not without its bumps.

Now, I'm not suggesting that McCain suspended his campaign to distract from his running mate's media debut. That's a stretch. But Palin--and by extension, McCain--have certainly benefited from the fact that the bailout brouhaha prevented a pair of less-than-flattering exchanges with Couric from making the sort of impact they would have made had Mr. McCain not, in fact, gone to Washington. (McCain scheduled a single last-minute interview yesterday--with Couric--and it was his chat, not Palin's, that led the CBS Evening News.)

The first exchange aired last night. Asked a predictable question--"Other than supporting stricter regulations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac two years ago, can you give us any more examples of his leading the charge for more oversight?"--Palin was stumped. As a fiscal conservative, McCain has long been opposed to market regulation--so there's not a huge record to refer to. Still, Palin could've mentioned McCain's push to "require that companies treat stock options granted to employees as expenses on their balance sheets" in the wake of the Enron collapse, or his early call for the resignation of SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt. Instead, she simply repeated Couric's Freddie and Fannie example. "That's paramount," added Palin. When Couric pressed harder, noting that McCain "has been in Congress for 26 years [and]... has almost always sided with less regulation, not more," Palin fell back on tangential talking points. "He's also known as the maverick, though," she said. It wasn't until Couric asked a second time for "specific examples in his 26 years of pushing for more regulation" that Palin finally begged off. "I'll try to find you some and I'll bring them to you," she offered. Not exactly to the best way to convince voters that "John McCain will reform the way Wall Street does business"--a favorite Palin line--or keep yourself out of an Obama attack ad.

The second exchange--which airs tonight on CBS--was even odder. Asked why "Alaska's proximity to Russia... enhances [her] foreign policy credentials"--something that Palin and McCain have repeatedly said--Palin seemed to suggest (uncomfortably) that she'd spent her two years as governor protecting the country from imminent invasion:

PALIN: Well, it certainly does because our-- our next door neighbors are foreign countries. They're in the state that I am the executive of. And there in Russia--

COURIC: Have you ever been involved with any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?

PALIN: We have trade missions back and forth. We-- we do-- it's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where-- where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is-- from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to-- to our state.

Even if the danger of Russia invading the U.S. was as clear and present as Palin seems to imply--hint: it's not--there's no evidence that public servants absorb foreign-policy expertise by osmosis, simply because their state is near another country. To rack up credentials, they have to actually engage in, you know, diplomacy, or military action, or legislative work, or something. Palin could've said that Russian war planes stage regular exercises in the buffer zone around Alaska and that she's kept tabs on their movements as commander in chief of the Alaska National Guard. But instead she launched into an implausible--and irrelevant--"Red Dawn" scenario that made her sound less informed and more unsteady than she may actually be.

Is any of this--barring our imminent war with the Bear--the end of the world? Of course not. Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden misspeaks constantly on the trail. In fact, I cataloged a bunch of his mistakes earlier this week. But that's precisely Palin's problem. Joe Biden says so much stuff in public--he's done nearly 100 interviews since the Democratic National Convention--that, after awhile, the gaffes start to seem like a small, unremarkable part of his larger oeuvre. "Whatever traps he sets for himself, however many minorities he offends, he always seems to wriggle out," writes Chris Beam over at Slate. "It's almost as if, by committing so many gaffes, he has become immune to their effects. 'Joe Biden Makes Gaffe' is the new 'Dog Bites Man.'" In other words, Biden isn't defined by his slips because he's already defined himself.

In contrast, Palin is an unknown quantity--and by sequestering her from the press and the public, the McCain campaign seems determined to keep her that way. The result of restricting her public remarks like this, however, is that it ratchets up the importance of the few unscripted things she does say. So relatively minor errors on Russia and regulation end up attracting an outsize amount of scrutiny--and possibly reinforcing the impression that Palin is "uninformed" or "unsteady." People interested in how she performs in the presidential pressure-cooker--without a script--have only these meager scraps to go on. 

McCain supporters will undoubtedly say that any and all scrutiny of Palin is the product of outrageous media bias. Some of it has been off-base. The early questions about whether she could balance the vice-presidency with motherhood were blatantly sexist. The conspiracy theories about her pregnancy were simply offensive. That said, the vast majority of inquiries are not even remotely unfair. Couric's were pretty gentle, in fact--standard running-mate fare. Conservatives may be sold on Palin. That's terrific. But some voters--i.e., the voters who will likely decide the election--still want to know more. Forty-nine percent of all respondents in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, for example, said the Alaska governor is not qualified to be president. They want to see Palin show her stuff--and I have no doubt she could. But by bottling her up, McCain and Co. risk letting her gaffes define her.

This week, Palin got a pass. Her interview with Couric attracted far less attention than it would've during a quieter news cycle--and that's one major benefit of McCain's bailout maneuver. But there are still 40 days until Nov. 4. And something tells me the luxury of distraction won't last.

UPDATE, Sept. 26: The American Prospect's Ezra Klein points out another potential drawback of keeping Palin under wraps:

The fact that Palin's responses to questions are becoming increasingly incoherent rather than rapidly more polished is interesting. Rote memorization should have all but eliminated the overlay of nonsense in her answers by now. Matt Yglesias offers a decent hypothesis, saying, "It’s possible that all this cramming is causing Palin to become less coherent — instead of just parrying questions she knows she doesn’t have good answers to, she’s trying to remember canned lines but it’s too much all at once to actually get right."... These aren't lies she's telling. It's not misdirection, or deception. It's just nonsense. It exists in a realm beyond where truth is a relevant concept, more akin to the utterances of sleeptalkers than to the prevarications of politicians. I always figured that Palin's trouble on the trail would come when she was exposed to the obscure questions of governance: Queries on drug policy and Afghani tribes and Medicare reimbursement. But instead, she's collapsing on the big questions, the issues that she should be able to dispatch with a memorized soundbite.

Hot on the heels of John McCain's request to postpone Friday's inaugural presidential debate comes this press release from Bob Barr, who says he's " more than willing to step in to participate" in McCain's absence.

How generous.

In case you're wondering, Bob Barr is running for president. As a Libertarian. Who is Bob Barr? you ask. A former Republican congressman from Georgia who led the impeachment efforts against President Bill Clinton, he's probably most famous nowadays for appearing in the Borat movie to accept a block of cheese made from Borat's wife's breast milk. That's right: the little guy with the mustache and glasses who bears an unsettling resemblance to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr.

Take it away, Bob. Your 15 minutes seconds begin... now:

With the recent proposal of Senator John McCain to postpone the first presidential debate, it is clear that the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) has no authority.

"For the past several elections, candidates have used the CPD as an official buffer to keep competition out of the two-party presidential contest," says Libertarian Party presidential nominee Bob Barr. "McCain publicly proved with his announcement what we've been saying all along: The candidates call the shots as to when to debate, where to debate and who to debate."

Barr continued, "Given Senator McCain's political stunt to avoid the debate, I ask that Friday's debate moves forward without him, as I am more than willing to step in to participate."

A valiant effort, but something tells me that Obama's not going to bite. Although it is worth noting--as Barr does later in the release--that Jimmy Carter skipped first debate of 1980, forcing Ronald Reagan to battle independent challenger John Anderson all by his lonesome. Of course, Anderson was polling around 20 percent at the time; Barr's currently pulling a paltry 1 percent or so. That said, Reagan did go on to win the election. So maybe Obama should reconsider--provided Barr leaves the breast-milk cheese at home.

UPDATE, 10:26 p.m.: The New Republic's Michael Schaffer makes the case for Barr:

Isn't this sort of a gimme for the Democrats? If Barack Obama really wants John McCain to de-suspend his participation, he ought to vow not only to invite Barr to fill the empty podium, but should promise to spend as much of the debate as possible teeing up his mustachioed interlocutor to deliver great zingers. By weekend, Barr could be at 20 percent in the polls and Obama could be on his way to a decisive win. 

Sounds downright McCainian...

What if John McCain's "amazing gambit"--suspending his campaign, calling off Friday's debate and inviting Barack Obama to return to Washington with him to work on the economic crisis--ends not with a bang but a whimper?

That's the way it's looking right now. When McCain delivered his surprise announcement here in New York yesterday afternoon, both he and the Democratic Party were quick to say that the Treasury's $700 billion bailout bill was in grave danger of collapsing. For McCain, "it ha[d] become clear that no consensus ha[d] developed to support the Administration's proposal" and that the nation was "running out of time." For the Dems, McCain's return to Washington "risk[ed] injecting presidential politics into this process" and delaying the legislation. Of course, this was pure political posturing. McCain wanted to appear as if he were rescuing America from a dire situation. The Democrats wanted it to appear as if he were creating one.

But the truth is, the legislation itself was approaching the finish line by the time McCain dropped his bombshell. "By 2:00 p.m. yesterday," writes the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder, "the House and Senate Democrats had settled their most important differences, the White House had caved on CEO pays, and the two sides were coming close to dealing with the bailout's oversight mechanism, its posture toward homeowners, and whether taxpayers would get ownership stakes in taken-over companies." Given that, it's somewhat ludicrous for McCain to claim--as he did again this morning in speech at the Clinton Global Initiative--that "no consensus has developed" and that "the plan on the table will [not] pass." That's simply not true. In fact, many of McCain's "five fundamental improvements"--oversight, CEO pay--have already been adopted. According to reports from the Hill, the most likely sequence of events for today is that Republican and Democratic congressional leaders--who are convening this morning (without McCain) to hammer the details--will present a consensus framework to be ratified at the unprecedented White House meeting between President Bush, Obama, McCain and top negotiators scheduled for 4:00 p.m.

At this point, McCain would have two choices: either sign off on the framework or, citing pet provisions left on the cutting room floor, announce that he will oppose the bill until it meets his exact specifications. The latter scenario is possible. The Senate Democratic leadership reportedly fears that McCain will vote "no"--defying Bush and "standing with" the American people, who remain skeptical of the bailout--in an attempt to burnish his "maverick" brand. But that maneuver carries such significant risks--not the least of which is being seen as deliberately destroying (for his own political posturing) a fragile bipartisan compromise that's crucial to the nation's economic security--that I suspect McCain take the safer route: acquiesce at the White House, vote "yes" on the legislation and fly to Oxford, Miss. in time for Friday night's debate.

Hence the whimper. Of course, McCain will try to argue that a) he helped seal the deal and b) improved the flawed Bush legislation to guard taxpayers. But the chronology--which shows that Congress and the White House were already nearing an agreement when McCain parachuted in--will contradict him. As House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said yesterday, "now that we’re on the verge of making a deal, John McCain drops himself in to make a deal." The only accurate argument available to McCain will be that the potentially polarizing effects of his presence "lit a fire under the behinds of Democratic negotiators," pushing them to meet today's 4:00 p.m. deadline--which, incidentally, was set by Bush. In other words, McCain's actual involvement will be entirely symbolic--a gesture rather than an accomplishment.

In all likelihood, the bill will pass. The candidates will debate. And business as usual will resume. Does this mean that voters should simply forget McCain's startling maneuver? Hardly. It may not result in any real consequences--positive or negative--but the Arizona senator's decision (and Obama's reaction) has provided us with the clearest window to date on their contrasting styles of leadership. Neither candidate did, said or proposed anything that actually helped solve the problem at hand. But their individual instincts were on display. Half-submerged in a political quagmire of economic uncertainty and dismal polling, McCain discarded the rules of the road and made a dramatic, unorthodox move that sent a unmistakable message but showed little concern for logistics on the ground. Meanwhile, Obama remained dispassionate, sticking to his talking points--here are my improvements; the debate must go on--and staying in Florida until summoned to Washington by the president.

Views on the candidates in crisis will differ. It's like a Rorschach Test of presidential leadership. Some will see McCain's response as bold, assertive, unconventional and impassioned. Indeed, the former fighter pilot's "need for speed" may be one reason he's leading among Independents--who are angrier than ever at Washington and may appreciate McCain's "mad as hell" attitude--by an astonishing 14 points (up from six earlier this month) in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Others will see McCain's response as gimmicky, reckless, impulsive and opportunistic. "An affront to American voters," carped the Washington Post's Harold Meyerson. "McCain's ploy was transparent." Likewise, Obama's reaction will strike some voters as steady, strong, rational and pragmatic. The aforementioned NBC/WSJ survey, for instance, shows that a majority of voters now agree that the Illinois senator could handle a military crisis well as president--a possible product of his confidence and certainty in the face of the Wall Street meltdown. Others, however, will see him as passive, detached, conventional and cautious.

Predictably, many of these disagreements will break along party lines. C'est la vie politique. The question going forward is what portion of the tiny segment of the populace still unsure which candidate they'll support on Nov. 4 will prefer McCain's style of leadership--as currently on display, and as reinforced over the next 40 days--to Obama's. More than anything else, the answer will determine our next president.

UPDATE: 1:15 p.m.: Et voilà! Congress reaches a "fundamental agreement," via the Crypt:

Top congressional negotiators have announced that they have a "fundamental agreement" on a government bailout of the nation's financial system, granting extraordinary powers to the secretary of Treasury to purchase hundreds of billions in bad debt while attempting to stem foreclosures for homeowners struggling on Main Street. The announcement came in the Capitol after a three-hour meeting involving a dozen of the top negotiators from both parties and both chambers of Congress.

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

CHANGE ELECTION TURNS OUT CONVENTIONAL
(John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei, Politico)
This was supposed to be the year when everything about presidential politics would change. Instead, the 2008 campaign is hurtling toward its conclusion as a year in which most things have stayed drearily the same.  Recall the early promise of 2008: There would be two candidates who spent the past several years expressing disdain for the stale partisanship of Washington and the stupid pet tricks that characterize presidential campaigns. There was an electorate supposedly hungering not for a change of leaders but a change in the fundamental ways in which politicians compete and debate ideas and solve problems... Well, forget it: Six weeks before Election Day, a day before the first scheduled debate, the forces of innovation and authenticity are being routed by the forces of conventionality and cliché. There are many reasons why this is so. Part of the answer is that Obama and McCain are more timid and less creative figures than they looked to be a year ago. The larger story is that the incentives in American politics rewarding politics as usual—especially in our own business, the media—are far more powerful than either candidate’s tentative and inconsistent impulses to challenge politics as usual.

FIRST DEBATE UP IN AIR AS MCCAIN STEPS OFF THE TRAIL
(Elisabeth Bumiller and Jeff Zeleny, New York Times)
The political maneuvering came as the financial bailout continued to dominate Washington, the headlines and the concerns of ordinary Americans. On Wednesday evening, both Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, accepted President Bush’s invitation to meet with him on Thursday to address the crisis. Mr. McCain’s actions not only cast doubt on whether the highly anticipated debate would come off, but also thrust an unpredictable new element into the negotiations for the bailout, with some Democrats warning that Mr. McCain’s intervention could derail progress being made on the rescue package. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, said Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama should not return to Washington and inject presidential politics into the bailout negotiations. “We need leadership, not a photo op,” a statement issued by Mr. Reid said. But Republicans, eager for political cover from Mr. McCain on a bailout proposal that members of both parties see as deeply unpopular in the country, embraced his return. 

FINANCIAL CRISIS UPENDS CAMPAIGN
(Laura Meckler, Elizabeth Holmes and Christopher Cooper, Wall Street Journal)
The latest twists in the neck-and-neck campaign landed in the middle of a week when troubles on Wall Street and Washington's reaction came to dominate the contest, leaving both Sens. McCain and Obama scrambling to figure out how best to respond. Sen. McCain cast his actions Wednesday as bold moves that rise above partisanship. Barely a week ago, both men had suspended activities to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and Sen. McCain evoked the event again. "Our national leaders came together in a time of crisis," he said in a statement. "We must show that kind of patriotism now." It was unclear whether the return of Sens. McCain and Obama to the capital would provide the jolt needed to reach a bipartisan deal that gives cover to politicians of both parties. And it was unclear who would benefit most from the new jockeying between the presidential contenders. The Arizona lawmaker also moved to take down his advertising Wednesday, and the dramatic gestures were in keeping with a career with many such moments. As in the past, it was both high risk and high reward. It draws attention to him at a time when Democrats stand to benefit from economic turmoil and helps him recast the question as one of leadership, where he is viewed positively. But he risks coming off as exploiting a very real problem for political gain.

SELFLESS OR RECKLESS? MCCAIN GAMBLES ON VOTERS' VERDICT
(Dan Balz, Washington Post)
The Republican presidential nominee is hoping that his abrupt decision to suspend campaigning, seek a delay of Friday's debate with Democrat Barack Obama, and return to Washington to help prod negotiations over a financial rescue package will be seen as the kind of country-first, bipartisan leadership he believes Americans want. What he risks, if things don't go as he hopes, is a judgment by voters that his move was a reckless act by an impetuous and struggling politician that hardened partisan lines in Washington at just the wrong moment and complicated efforts to deal with the biggest financial crisis in more than half a century... Much now will depend on whether McCain can deliver results and whether there is a constructive role for him and Obama, or whether they become a sideshow to the real negotiations. But Obama's course carries risks as well, if he looked as if he were standing on the sidelines while McCain pushed for intervention that could help avert further damage to the nation's economy. The standoff over the debate left both candidates in potentially awkward positions, although there is plenty of time for it to be resolved. McCain may be reluctant to climb down from his insistence that the debate be delayed until there is an agreement on a package, but he could be seen as scuttling an important event for voters eager to see the two candidates side by side. Obama, on the other hand, may look high-handed if he insists on going ahead as negotiations in Washington reach a critical moment by this weekend.

STUNT MAN
(John Dickerson, Slate)
It's not clear what, exactly, McCain is going to do in Washington. He doesn't sit on any of the relevant committees, and everyone is already deep in negotiations. Still, he's coming anyway. It doesn't make much logical sense. The only way to understand it is politically: In a presidential campaign, the surest sign that a candidate is playing politics on an issue is when he claims not to be playing politics on an issue... McCain's maneuver might look phony—but then, he and Obama have been engaging in phony activities since this financial crisis hit. Both candidates have been huddling with economic brains, as if they were already a government in waiting. They've both tried to act in ways that help voters see them as competent crisis managers. Perhaps McCain will help us define that line between the charades that voters allow and those they think are ridiculous, but he got an assist from the president. Bush called for a bipartisan meeting with congressional leaders and for McCain and Obama to talk about the crisis. Obama had to accept, a tacit buy-in into the McCain strategy. McCain and Obama also issued a joint statement calling for bipartisan cooperation... So even if McCain has to spend the next several days defending his motivations, he may be able to do so at least partially on his terms. Voters might see it as a transparent political act, or they might just hear "McCain takes bold action in response to crisis."

The McCain campaign wants you to see today's "suspension" as McCain sacrificing politics in the service of a higher cause--namely, getting the nation's economy back on track. The Obama campaign wants you to see it as McCain pretending to sacrifice politics for his own political gain. The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder makes the latter case in the sort of language you're not going to hear from Chicago, but that probably reflects how the campaign feels about the proper role of politics in the face of the current crisis:

This is the time when politics matters the most, not the least. When the philosophical differences that each party organizes around are put to the test of reality. When conflict builds consensus, not by ignoring conflict. When the public craves answers and debate from their politicians. When the stakes of the presidential election could not be more acute. Comparative advantage: the best thing the presidential candidates can do now is to practice their politics honestly, not to abandon politics altogether -- itself, of course, a political move. Suspending your campaign basically says: all that over the past sixteen months? It wasn't important. Ignore what I said or did. Too late. The tough thing here for McCain is that nobody in Washington asked him to come back; nobody seems to need him to come back; and that Democrats simply do not trust John McCain's motives.

What you will hear from Team Obama is that presidential hopefuls have never abandoned politics in the past--despite the grave problems that have arisen before Election Day. To wit: the following list of "major news events on days of past presidential and vice-presidental debates" sent out by Obama spokesman Bill Burton at 5:56 p.m. One thing I will say in McCain's defense--few of these events were as monumental as the current crisis, and the ones that were didn't really lend themselves to the immediate involvement of the candidates.

LIST POSTED AFTER THE JUMP...

In a statement delivered this afternoon in New York City, John McCain announced that he will temporarily suspend his presidential campaign Thursday morning and return to Washington to address the financial crisis. As a result, he requested that Friday's foreign-policy debate in Oxford, Miss., be delayed and urged rival Barack Obama to join him in the capital for a summit with top congressional leaders.

"I am calling on the president to convene a meeting with the leadership from both houses of Congress, including Senator Obama and myself," McCain said. "It is time for both parties to come together to solve this problem."

The announcement comes a day after this blog noted the remarkable similarities between McCain and Barack Obama's lists of recommended "improvements" for the mammoth $700 billion Treasury bailout bill--and criticized both candidates for continuing to "us[e] the bailout to bludgeon each other daily on the campaign trail," suggesting that the real political advantage might lie elsewhere. Namely, in the swamp.

"Why don't the two most powerful politicians in the country at this point--two politicians who profess to be uncommonly bipartisan--go back to Washington and lead the bipartisan effort to get America out of this catastrophic financial mess?" we asked. "Why don't they steer Congress in the direction--toward Main Street and away from Wall Street--they both agree it should go?"

Now, it seems, that's exactly what McCain intends to do. There's no doubt that much of Arizona senator's motivation is political. According to the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, Obama's double-digit advantage on handling the Wall Street meltdown has propelled him to a 52-43 percent lead among likely voters, up from a 47-49 percent McCain advantage immediately after the Republican National Convention. Other polls--both state and national--have shown a similar swing. By "suspending" his campaign and heading back to the Beltway, McCain is doing a couple things. He's shifting the narrative away from his dismal numbers and campaign manager Rick Davis's ties to Freddie Mac. He's attempting to counter the growing impression that he's ill-equipped to serve as the economy's steward by displaying "leadership" in a time of crisis. He's wriggling out of the box congressional Dems were hoping to squeeze him into. He's potentially postponing the foreign-policy debate to a time when it would have greater impact. And he's seeking to rise above the fray and reinforce the message that he "puts country before politics." To emphasize that theme, McCain has canceled tonight's appearance on David Letterman and instructed his staff to take his campaign commercials off the air. Will voters find his decision to "take action" compelling--even though he doesn't sit on any of the relevant committees? We'll see soon enough.

The maneuver has the added benefit--at least for McCain--of putting Obama in a bit of bind. Either the Illinois senator flies from Florida to Washington and looks as if he's following McCain's lead or he dismisses McCain's move as a stunt and gives the GOP more fodder to call Obama an "all talk, no action" phony who puts "self before country." Either option has the potential to undermine Obama's greatest advantage--the perception that he's the better economic leader. For Chicago, the delicate political calculus was immediately apparent, as Obama spokesman Bill Burton swiftly claimed credit for the new spirit of solidarity in an e-mail to reporters that said it was Obama who called McCain this morning to pitch a joint statement "outlining their shared principles and conditions for the Treasury proposal and urging Congress and the White House to act in a bipartisan manner to pass such a proposal." Within minutes, the McCain campaign disputed Burton's timeline, saying that McCain never received the morning call and had subsequently proposed the "suspension" to Obama at 2:30 p.m. with no knowledge of Obama's original pitch. Call it the politics of pretending to suspend politics.

Despite Chicago's touchiness, there's no guarantee that McCain will benefit politically from his latest gambit. Voters might conclude he's avoiding a debate that--despite its ostensible focus on foreign policy--promised to touch on uncomfortable economic issues, as well. After all, McCain could potentially work on the bill and then travel to Mississippi--an argument the debate's organizers and the Obama campaign are sure to make in the hours ahead. Some moderates may see this maneuver as further evidence of McCain's erratic, impulsive temperament. Others could interpret it as a desperate gimmick, given that McCain's isn't "suspending" anything other than two days of debate prep. The Democratic congressional leadership won't make it easy for McCain to claim victory, which will further politicize the process. (Harry Reid is already saying his presence "would not be helpful"--even after urging McCain to get involved yesterday.) And if the final bailout is unpopular with the public--which seems likely--McCain could be blamed. So there are significant risks involved. 

But for today, this is almost all upside for McCain, at least politically. He presents himself as a bipartisan leader. He puts Obama on the defensive. He shifts the media narrative onto favorable terrain and dominates the news. And politics aside, there's the always a chance--which I flicked at yesterday--that rolling up his sleeves and engaging in a little bipartisan action will actually help make the bill better. That question is whether the benefits will last. As the New Republic's Michael Crowley notes, the ultimate assessment of McCain's gambit should hinge on whether he "play[s] a convincingly important and useful role in the Washington legislative process, one that pleases independents and his base alike." And that's significantly more difficult than simply skipping Letterman.

UPDATE, 4:45 p.m.:  From Florida, Obama responds by calling for the debate to proceed as planned--and mocking McCain's apparent unwillingness to multitask:

“It’s my belief that this is exactly the time the American people need to hear from the person who in approximately 40 days will be responsible with dealing with this mess ... What I think is important is that we don’t suddenly infuse Capitol Hill with presidential politics ... Presidents are going to have to deal with more than one thing at a time. It’s not necessary for us to think that we can do only one thing, and suspend everything else."

Strikes me as reasonable--the best he could do in a difficult situation. Obama also recounted his version of the timeline to make the important point that if McCain were really interested in bipartisan solutions he would've settled on a plan in private before going in front of the cameras. "The only possible miscommunication might have been how quickly there was an announcement and somebody was on television," Obama said. "My assumption was that the joint statement would go out--initially."

My hunch is that Friday's debate won't happen unless Congress miraculously hammers out an agreement before then. McCain can't go back on his suspension without looking weak--so I suspect he'll skip it.

The bottom line: the political success of McCain's maneuver will turn on whether the public sees him as shirking his duties as a presidential candidate or fulfilling his duties as a public servant.

UPDATE, 9:26 p.m.: Via Ben Smith:

CNN reports that McCain's campaign is proposing swapping the planned Friday debate for next Thursday's vice presidential debate if, and only if, there isn't a bailout deal reached by Friday. There was already a reasonable chance that a deal would be reached by Friday; now, if it is, McCain can declare victory and head to Mississippi, having retaken some of the initiative.

In his new article on Team McCain's willingness to say something misleading and then, when challenged, suggest that the truth or falsity of their statements doesn't actually matter--Obama commits the first sin, but not the second--the New Republic's Jonathan Chait highlights a fascinating poly-sci study that I, for one, had never heard of:

Last February, political scientists Brendan Nyhan of Duke and Jason Reifler of Georgia State published the results of an experiment designed to test the effects of political untruths. The results would unsettle any idealist. The first conclusion they found was that lies work. When subjects were confronted with an untrue political claim (President Bush banned stem-cell research; weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq) respondents naturally moved toward those positions. When the lie was corrected, however, the effect of the untruth in moving opinions largely remained. The truth, in other words, is no antidote for a lie.

Their second conclusion was even more disturbing. Subjects who identified as politically conservative were not only immune to the effects of having a lie corrected, the correction made them even more likely to believe a lie. So, for instance, one group of conservative subjects was presented with a news story that depicted President Bush claiming weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. A second group of conservatives was presented with the same thing, along with a paragraph noting that Bush's statement was untrue. The second group was more likely than the first to believe that Iraq possessed WMDs. The very fact of the press challenging their beliefs seems to have made conservatives more likely to embrace them. If this finding is broadly correct, then the media's newfound willingness to fact-check McCain will only succeed in rallying the GOP base to his side.

Who knows if Steve Schmidt and Co. are aware of the Duke/Georgia State research. But I suspect that they intuitively grasp its importance. It's why spokesman Brian Rogers told Politico that "we're running a campaign to win, and we're not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it." And it's why Republican strategist John Feehery informed The Washington Post that "the more The New York Times and The Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there's a bigger truth out there, and the bigger truths are: She's new, she's popular in Alaska, and she is an insurgent. As long as those are out there, these little facts don't really matter." It's not just that getting factchecked doesn't dissuade voters from believing the initial lie. It's that it actually makes some of them more likely to believe it. So why not just make stuff up?

My question--as always--is whether the apparent benefits of being called a liar by the MSM (i.e., selling the lie to McCain's conservative base) outweigh the costs among undecided moderates, who tend to vote on personality over policy and may be swayed by the broader "McCain is misleading you" meme. Either way, as a journalist I find the postmodern disdain for the truth documented in the Georgia State experiment--and Team McCain's related decision to run as if "facts don't really matter"--sort of unsettling.

RELATED: Read my take on Obama's lies here.

For months, the presidential contenders savage each other on the stump and in the press. They attack their opponent's policies. They question their rival's character. They hurl all manner of insults, accusations and calumnies in the general direction of the only other life form crazy enough to want to be leader of the free world. But every year in late September each White House hopeful suddenly discovers that there's one thing he actually admires about the other guy: his debating ability. So they and their advisers spend the days leading up to the first presidential clash fawning over their enemy's supposedly spectacular skills.

Let the Expectations Game begin. An age-old campaign ritual, it involves lowering your own bar for success--inhale, exhale, don't drool--while simultaneously claiming that your foe is the greatest orator since Cicero. Nowadays, no one takes this spin-a-riffic charade seriously--least of all political reporters. But the campaigns continue to indulge. With presidential debate season set to kick off Friday night in Oxford, Miss., we thought it'd be fun to collect all the transparently fulsome praise and preposterous self-deprecation flying back and forth between the campaigns in one place. Here's the first installment:

Obama Communications Adviser Robert Gibbs, Sept. 22: "John McCain has boasted throughout the campaign about his decades of Washington foreign-policy experience and what an advantage that would be for him. This debate offers him major home-court advantage and anything short of a game-changing event will be a key missed opportunity for him."  

John McCain, Saginaw, Mich., Sept. 23: “As you know we’ve got a debate on Friday night, and we’ve got a couple of debates after that. And look, have no doubt about the capabilities of, of Senator Obama to a debate. I mean, he’s very, very good. He was able to defeat Senator Hillary Clinton who as we all know is very accomplished, very accomplished. And he was able to, I think, with his eloquence, inspire a great number of Americans. So these are going to be tough debates, my friends."

Obama Spokesman Bill Burton, Sept. 23: "Given his decades in Washington, John McCain literally has more experience debating than anyone who has ever run for president. If he can't show the skills he's acquired debating foreign policy, it will be a massive disappointment."

Gotta love the not-so-subtle digs at Obama's "eloquence" and McCain's "decades in Washington." More undoubtedly to come...

CNN's Campbell Brown thinks so:

(Hat tip: Jonathan Martin)

This part in particular strikes me as a pretty savvy turning of the tables: "Tonight, I call on the McCain campaign to stop treating Sarah Palin like a delicate flower that will wilt at any moment. This woman is from Alaska, for crying out loud. She is strong. She is tough. She is confident. And you claim that she is ready to be one heartbeat away from the presidency. If that is the case, then end this chauvinistic treatment of her now. Allow her to show her stuff." (BTW: Brown is married to Republican consultant and former Bush deputy press secretary Dan Senor.)

Of course, McCain supporters would say that it's the media's treatment of Palin that's been sexist and that reporters don't "deserve" to talk to her. But from an electoral perspective, McCain supporters don't matter--they're already supporting McCain. The question is whether moderate swing voters will see the campaign's continued sequestering of Palin as the MSM's righteous comeuppance or, like Brown, as a unnecessarily paranoid tactic that's left them unable to evaluate Palin's preparedness--and, if it's the latter, whether those unallayed doubts will ultimately keep them from voting for the Republican ticket. There's no question that McCain is making his base happy by "punishing the press." But might he be alienating undecideds--the folks who sincerely want to see Palin "show her stuff" before Election Day--in the process?

I don't pretend to know the answer. Thoughts? Insights? Ad hominem attacks? The comments are all yours.

(For my take on Palin's "question-free" New York visit, click here.)

UPDATE, 1;47 p.m.: The fun continues! From today's pool report on McCain and Palin's meeting with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvilli:

McCain then looked around the room and gestured as if to welcome questions. The AP reporter shouted a question at Gov. Palin (“Governor, what have you learned from your meetings?”) but McCain aide Brooke Buchanan intervened and shepherded everybody out of the room. Palin looked surprised, leaned over to McCain and asked him a question, to which your pooler thinks he shook his head as if to say “No.”

On Monday, I wrote about the "Boomerang Effect" currently bedeviling John McCain's presidential bid: "First, McCain chastises Obama for committing a sin that he himself has committed. Then Obama points this out, distracting voters from his own foibles and refocusing the spotlight on McCain. For Obama, the impact of the attack is immediately negated. But for McCain it's doubled: he ends up looking both a) guilty of whatever he accused Obama of and b) totally hypocritical."

My major example was McCain's attacks on Obama for associating with former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson. The problem? McCain's own campaign is swarming with 26 advisers or fundraisers who have lobbied or are currently lobbying for Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac--including campaign manager Rick Davis. When the New York Times reported Monday that Freddie Mac had previously paid an advocacy group run by Davis $30,000 a month until the end of 2005, the McCain campaign vehemently denied that Davis still had ties to the mortgage giant. In fact, Davis told reporters during a conference call that "it's been over three years since there's been any activity in this area and since I had any contact with those folks." 

Unfortunately, that's not quite accurate. As NEWSWEEK's tireless investigative ace Mike Isikoff reports this morning, Freddie Mac also paid Davis's consulting and lobbying firm Davis Manafort a consulting fee of $15,000 a month starting in 2005--before Davis took a leave of absence to work on the McCain campaign--and ending only last month, when the U.S. government acquired the firm. (The New York Times has also posted a story on the payments.) Davis is still a partner and equity-holder in Davis Manafort, so he continues to benefit from its income. So far, Team McCain has attacked the messengers--as usual--but they haven't disputed the allegations, except to say Davis isn't profiting personally from Freddie Mac and therefore doesn't have, according to the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder, a "direct financial conflict of interest in helping McCain develop policy." But that ignores the larger issue: whether Freddie put Davis's firm on retainer--at Davis's request--because of Davis's relationship with McCain. "The story's not about profit," writes Ambinder. "It's about influence buying."

Is this doomsday for McCain? Hardly. But it is hypocritical. As I wrote Monday, "the only thing dumber than throwing a stone from your glass abode [is] throwing a boomerang." And this one just circled back around. 

Take it away, Isikoff:

Since 2006, the federally sponsored mortgage giant Freddie Mac has paid at least $345,000 to the lobbying and consulting firm of John McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis, according to two sources familiar with the arrangement...

McCain and his aides have vehemently objected to suggestions that Davis has ties to Freddie Mac—an especially sensitive issue given that the Republican presidential candidate has blamed "the lobbyists, politicians and bureaucrats" for the mortgage crisis that recently prompted the Bush administration to take over both Freddie Mac and its companion, Fannie Mae, and put them under federal conservatorship.

But neither the Times story—nor the McCain campaign—revealed that Davis's lobbying firm, Davis Manafort, based in Washington, D.C., continued to receive $15,000 a month from Freddie Mac until last month—long after the Homeownership Alliance had been terminated. The two sources, who requested anonymity discussing sensitive information, told NEWSWEEK that Davis himself approached Freddie Mac in 2006 and asked for a new consulting arrangement that would allow his firm to continue to be paid. The arrangement was approved by Hollis McLoughlin, Freddie Mac's senior vice president for external relations, because "he [Davis] was John McCain's campaign manager and it was felt you couldn't say no," said one of the sources...

When asked about his own campaign manager's associations with the mortgage giants, McCain, in an interview with CNBC on Sunday night, said that Davis "has had nothing to do" with the Homeownership Alliance since it disbanded and "I'll be glad to have his record examined by anybody who wants to look at it."...

Davis, in a conference call arranged by the McCain campaign on Monday, said "it's been over three years since there's been any activity in this area and since I had any contact with those folks." Davis also said he "had a severed leave of absence" from his lobbying and consulting firm, and "I've taken no compensation from my firm for 18 months." (A campaign spokesman said that Davis receives no partnership distribution under his arrangement)...

Freddie Mac has had no contact with Davis Manafort other than receiving monthly invoices from the firm and paying them. But the money could be perceived as helping Freddie Mac ensure a good relationship with one of McCain's top aides in the event that he became president. The payments, along with other lobbying and consulting contracts, are expected to be terminated by the new federal overseers, the sources said.

READ THE REST HERE.

(Photo credit: Charles Dharapak / AP)

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

ECONOMIC FEARS GIVE OBAMA CLEAR LEAD OVER MCCAIN IN POLL
(Dan Balz and Jon Coen, Washington Post)
More voters trust Obama to deal with the economy, and he currently has a big edge as the candidate who is more in tune with the economic problems Americans now face. He also has a double-digit advantage on handling the current problems on Wall Street, and as a result, there has been a rise in his overall support. The poll found that, among likely voters, Obama now leads McCain by 52 percent to 43 percent. Two weeks ago, in the days immediately following the Republican National Convention, the race was essentially even, with McCain at 49 percent and Obama at 47 percent.  As a point of comparison, neither of the last two Democratic nominees -- John F. Kerry in 2004 or Al Gore in 2000 -- recorded support above 50 percent in a pre-election poll by the Post and ABC News.

BAILOUT MET WITH MIXED REVIEWS AS MARKETS FALL
(David Rogers, Politico)
Treasury’s $700 billion rescue plan for the financial markets stumbled badly in Congress on Tuesday, reflecting growing concern about the huge cost and an angry cultural divide between lawmakers in both parties and the legislation’s principal architects. Critics deride the idea as Main Street bailing out Wall Street. Proponents speak from an entirely different perspective, casting the massive government intervention as less of a rescue than a novel experiment in “price discovery” that will add not just capital but also vital knowledge to free up frozen credit markets important to the average consumer... Vice President Cheney and White House chief of staff Josh Bolten fared little better before a hostile House Republican conference. And after days of intense activity, Treasury negotiations with the House Financial Services Committee slowed to allow top Democrats to take the political temperature before making final decisions on the package, which is still expected to come to the floor this week.To rally support, the White House is actively considering a speech to the nation by President Bush prior to House floor debate. And given the anger among voters at home and closeness of November’s elections, the political nervousness among members of both parties is not surprising.

OBAMA, MCCAIN CAUTIOUSLY WATCH FINANCIAL DEBATE
(Charles Babington, Associated Press)
Presidential rivals Barack Obama and John McCain warily addressed the nation's financial crisis and a proposed $700 billion response Tuesday, demanding changes in the Bush administration's plan without specifying exactly what would trigger their outright opposition. The financial meltdown is bedeviling both candidates, who know the Nov. 4 election could turn on voters' sense of who can best keep the country from a deep recession. They have acted cautiously so far, avoiding the intense debate in Congress and offering similar calls for greater oversight and taxpayer protections, which rank among the less controversial criticisms of the plan. Neither campaign has changed its tax or spending proposals even though the country suddenly faces the prospect of much higher deficits, an overhaul of key financial institutions and the essential nationalization of the country's largest insurance company. Whether they deal with it now or not, economists and analysts say, the next president may find it extremely difficult to keep all his promises because of the worsening fiscal environment. 

BOTTOM LINE: MCCAIN AND THE BAILOUT
(George Stephanopoulos, ABC News)
Before one of the two men running for president inherits the nation's economic mess from President Bush, they'll have to cast a vote on whether a congressional plan to provide $700 billion in bailout money for Wall Street makes sense. Both Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., are holding their cards close. But it is McCain who may ultimately hold the fate of the proposal in his hands. Top congressional Republicans say if McCain does not support the bill, it will likely die, putting McCain in a difficult political position... "Everything I've heard today backs up (others are reporting) that if (McCain), that he goes no, this package would likely fail, and then he would bare the consequences for that. That is a huge political gamble. Which is why the administration is betting that, in the end, McCain will be for this package. But McCain's aides say he has not made up his mind, and one (aide) told me that McCain is determined to, quote, 'be the champion of the little guy here.'"

OBAMA CARRIES UNEVEN RECORD AS DEBATER TO FIRST CONTEST WITH MCCAIN
(John M. Broder, New York Times)
Senator Barack Obama has shown himself at times to be a great orator. His debating skills, however, have been uneven. Some of his chief strengths — his facility with words, his wry detachment, his reasoning skills, his youthful cool — have not always served him well and may pose significant vulnerabilities in the series of presidential debates that begins Friday, according to political analysts and a review of his earlier debate performances. Mr. Obama has a tendency to overintellectualize and to lecture, befitting his training as a lawyer and law professor. He exudes disdain for the quips and sound bites that some deride as trivializing political debates but that have become a central part of scoring them. He tends to the earnest and humorless when audiences seem to crave passion and personality. He frequently rises above the mire of political combat when the battle calls for engagement.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

When it comes to the mammoth $700 billion Treasury bailout proposed by Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke earlier this week, Barack Obama and John McCain talk a good game. But the question is whether they're willing to walk the walk as well--and put the health of the nation's financial infrastructure before politics.

In a pair of dueling press conferences this afternoon--McCain's was his first in 40 days--the two presidential candidates enumerated the "improvements" they'd like to see before the bill passes Congress. Their lists were remarkably similar. Both candidates proposed bipartisan board to oversee the Treasury's distribution of funds. Both demanded limits on CEO compensation. Both requested a plan to help distressed homeowners avoid foreclosure. And both demanded a way for taxpayers to recoup an outlay that could reach $1 trillion. None of these proposals are particularly controversial. In fact, the only disagreement between the rivals is over Obama's proposed $115 billion economic-stimulus package with tax breaks for the middle class. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Obama's aides suggest it "isn't a deal breaker."

And yet they're still using the bailout to bludgeon each other daily on the campaign trail.

So here's my question: why don't the two most powerful politicians in the country at this point--two politicians who profess to be uncommonly bipartisan--go back to Washington and lead the bipartisan effort to get America out of this catastrophic financial mess? Why don't they steer Congress in the direction--toward Main Street and away from Wall Street--they both agree it should go?

I understand the politics at stake. For Obama, cooperating with McCain would defang his sharpest economic attack: that it was McCain's ideological opposition to regulation that got us into this mess, and that McCain is now refashioning himself as a populist regulator by echoing Obama's earlier positions. The Illinois senator has a point. And neither candidate wants to detour from the campaign trail so close to Election Day or leave his fingerprints on an unwieldy piece of legislation that will inevitably anger some bloc of voters. Acutely aware that "opposing the plan could look irresponsible in the face of financial meltdown" but that "supporting a bailout for Wall Street firms while voters are suffering their own economic hardships could be hazardous, too," the candidate aren't even willing to say whether they'll show up to vote. At this point, winning is everything.

Still, I can't help but wonder whether the political benefits of rolling up their sleeves and being seen engaging in a little bipartisanship--anything from a joint statement of principles to actually maneuvering in the halls of the Senate--would end up outweighing the political costs.

I don't know pretend to know the answer. That said, it's hard to take McCain and Obama's "improvements" seriously unless they actually spend a little capital to get them implemented. Until then, we should probably see these recommendations for what they are: soundbites meant to provide the candidates with cover if the current version passes. They're certainly not real attempts to make it better.

UPDATE, Sept. 24: Bipartisanship? Pshaw. According to ABC News' Jake Tapper, some folks on the Hill expect McCain to pull out all the partisan stops:

Senior Democrats on the Hill are worried that Sen. McCain, R-Ariz., will "demagogue" the bill, continue to voice opposition to it, use it to run against both Wall Street and Congress, as well as to distance himself from the Bush White House. Democrats worry McCain will not only vote against the bill, he will provide cover for other Republicans to do so, leaving Democrats holding the bag for the Bush administration's deeply unpopular proposal.

How productive.

(AP Photo / Henny Ray Abrams)

Remember what I wrote last week about the McCain campaign pulling back the curtain and finally allowing the press and the public to interact, however fleetingly, with its long-sequestered vice-presidential nominee?

Um, nevermind. 

Knowing that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is currently visiting Manhattan, Father of Stumper asked this morning whether I'd be "hanging out" with the Mooseburger Queen of Wasilla. As we speak, she's over at the United Nations General Assembly shindig meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in an attempt to establish international insta-cred. I told him no. The sessions are closed to the public, I said, and I'm not planning on joining her press pool.

Turns out it wouldn't have mattered if I did. Originally, the McCain campaign indicated that two editorial journalists--Elizabeth Holmes of the Wall Street Journal and CNN embed Peter Hamby--would be allowed to attend the so-called “pool sprays” before Palin’s conclaves, which are basically "glorified photo opportunities during which journalists can snap photos and film footage and–if they’re lucky–shout a question or two at Palin and her company before she adjourns for private meetings," as Ken Vogel writes over at Politico. But an hour before the events, the McCain campaign decided to bar both Holmes and Hamby, claiming that the sprays were appropriate only for photographers and videographers because "there were not going to be questions or statements." That's one way to put it. The other? That the campaign would benefit from free pictures of Palin huddling with world leaders without exposing her to the possibility of having to hear--not even answer, but hear--a question from a real journalist.

Ultimately, Team McCain allowed CNN to cover the spray for all of 29 seconds--but only after the cable channel refused to send its cameras. Without CNN in the room, none of the networks would've received video footage, so the McCain campaign had to relent. Otherwise, it would've faced a total TV blackout. As for Holmes, she was out of luck--as was the print pool relying on her report.

I get that Team McCain wants to "protect" Palin from the press. But this is getting ridiculous. Last week, I interpreted Palin's off-the-cuff decision as she was entering a Cleveland diner to respond to a CBS reporter's request for comment on the AIG bailout--her first answer to an impromptu question from the national press since joining the ticket last month--as a sign that McCain's running mate might be opening up. Instead, it seems to have marked the start of a new effort to stifle ALL editorial coverage of the candidate. As the CBS embed reports today, a Palin staffer told him that questions “weren’t allowed” after he had the temerity to approach Palin in Cleveland, and the campaign chose not to notify the pool reporter assigned to be in Palin's motorcade when the candidate departed Sunday for a scheduled stop at an Orlando ice-cream parlor--meaning that "there was no editorial presence at the event."

It's one thing to refuse interview requests, ignore questions, choose rallies over town halls and not even entertain the possibility of press conferences. That's how Palin has managed to interact with only one nonpartisan journalist and one group of voters in her four weeks as a potential vice president. (In contrast, Joe Biden has done more than 80 interviews with local and national media since the Democrats held their national convention late last month.) But it's another thing altogether to systematically avoid situations where a question might even be posed, which is what the McCain camp is doing now. The former is a strategy--an undemocratic strategy, but a strategy all the same--designed to limit the risk of gaffes. The latter is pure, irrational fear.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: The media-bashing masses may squeal with vindictive delight. Still, it's worth noting that the political press corps--as despised as it might be, often fairly--is actually important here. Thanks to Palin's relatively skimpy resume, the greatest test of her readiness for office--as it was for the comparably green Obama--will be how well she performs in the campaign pressure-cooker. There's no better measure of her character and convictions than dueling with press and the public on a regular basis. Palin's rise has been remarkable. But until she answers some tough, fair questions, we won't know whether it's prepared her for high office.

So here's hoping we find out before Nov. 4 whether Crystal City's fear is justified. After that it'll be too late.

UPDATE. 4:50 p.m.: Via Jonathan Martin: "Campaign aides, calculating the cost/benefit analysis of such extreme measures, have now decided to allow print reporters into Palin's subsequent meetings this afternoon." He also has Hamby's pool report on Karzai and Holmes' dispatch on Kissinger, if you're interested. As you can see--no questions--the McCain camp was being pretty paranoid. I mean, I know reporters are somewhat disheveled-looking, but really...

I receive dozens of nutty emails from P.R. people every day. But the one that hit my inbox at 11:18 this morning has to be the nuttiest. I won't name names or anything. I'll just let the pitch speak for itself.

Washington, D.C.; September 23, 2008...A strategically scented presidential campaign, incorporating calculated aromas in event venues, signs and merchandise, could turn the tide in the current presidential race. With polls indicating the election is extremely close, the result could come down to just a few percentage points separating Senators John McCain and Barack Obama...

There is a multitude of research proving that scent highly influences a person's perception of products and people. Studies show that scent can significantly alter the perception of age, weight, attractiveness, and reliability of a person...

Endorphin branding is the use of scent as a means of imprinting a highly emotional, positive experience in tandem with a targeted signature scent, which can be reintroduced at a later time to trigger and recreate the desired response. This strategy should be implemented at political events, which are positively charged environments ripe for this type of scent branding.

This presidential election has already seen historic, innovative campaign efforts, particularly Senator Obama's use of the Internet to raise funds and communicate his messages. A multi-faceted, scented campaign could provide the edge one of these candidates needs to help gain victory in November.

Could it now? And here I thought the election was all about turnout and economic messaging.

All kidding aside--or most kidding aside--I'd love to hear your picks for each candidate's "targeted individual scent." Should McCain deploy a manly musk? Or is the smell of mothballs and Ben-Gay more fitting? Would a Polynesian aroma--say, Plumeria flowers--prove too "exotic" for Obama? Perhaps he should stick with apple pie instead...

Who "nose." This could be the future of political marketing. 

I'll highlight the best response in this space. If there are any.

On the stump, Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden likes to say that John McCain is disconnected from ordinary Americans. But lately it seems like Biden is the one who's "out of touch"--at least with his own campaign.

When Barack Obama selected Biden as his running mate late last month, the punditocracy immediately predicted that the Delaware senator's predilection for saying stupid stuff at regular intervals--the term of art is "gaffe machine," I believe--would prove detrimental to his new boss's presidential bid. Until now, though, Biden's loose tongue hasn't been much of problem. It's not that he hasn't slipped up on occassion; he has, after all, admitted that Hillary Clinton "might have been a better [veep] pick" and asked the wheelchair-bound Missouri politician Chuck Graham to "stand up" at a rally. But so far, Biden's bloopers have been eclipsed by the planet-sized celebrity phenomenon known to us earthlings as Sarah Palin--a good thing for the body politic, given that most of his mistakes to date have been of the "totally irrelevant but typically distracting" variety.

Not anymore. In the past few days--just as Palinsanity has begun to die down--Biden has made a series of strange public statements that suggest he's either at odds with Obama on key policy issues or that he isn't aware of what Obama believes. Individually, they've served to cloud Obama's message on matters of substance; taken together, they suggest that someone in Chicago should give the guy a good talking to. If he or she can get a word in edgewise, that is.

Biden's string of slip-ups started last Monday. Asked by NBC's Meredith Viera whether the Fed should bail out insurance giant AIG, the senator said no: "I don't think they should be bailed out by the federal government." Unfortunately, the remark had more in common with McCain's initial position on the bailout (instinctive opposition) than Obama's carefully cultivated claim that he would not "second-guess" the government. When the bailout went through, both Biden and McCain bowed to reality. But the shift left Obama in a tricky position--as Matt Lauer pointed out this morning on "Today." Noting that Obama had been hitting McCain for flip-flopping on the AIG bailout, Lauer asked the Illinois senator how he could criticize his Republican rival when his own running mate had made the same mistake. His answer? "I think Joe should have waited as well." Awkward.

The past few days have been even worse. Speaking Thursday on ABC's "Good Morning America," Biden not only acknowledged that the wealthy would pay higher taxes if if he and Obama won the White House, but said that doing so would be "patriotic." "It's time to be patriotic," he said. "Time to jump in, time to be part of the deal, time to help get America out of the rut." Whether or not you agree with that sentiment, emphasizing that Obama would raise rates on rich folks (instead of saying that he'd lower them on the middle-classes) was clearly off-message--and the "patriotism" soundbite gave the GOP something catchy to hang its "distribution of wealth" hat on. Accompanied by a sarcastic ad, McCain's response was scathing: "Raising taxes in a tough economy isn't patriotic. It's not a badge of honor. It's just dumb policy." Expect to hear more on Biden's idea of patriotism before Nov. 4.

Incredibly, though, the senator seems to have saved the worst for last. Asked last night by Katie Couric on CBS Evening News Biden delivered what has to be most off-message statement yet: that one of his campaign's own ads--the spot released earlier this month mocking McCain for not being able to use a computer--was "terrible." "I didn't know we did it and if I had anything to do with it, we would have never done it," he said. The campaign was soon forced to issue a less-than-convincing clarification in Biden's name. (Apparently he'd "never seen" the ad.") Meanwhile, video surfaced this morning of Biden telling a rope-line environmentalist in Ohio that he and Obama "are not supporting clean coal" in America--even though Obama, well, is. McCain quickly pounced, using Biden's error to pivot away from Wall Street and make the case that Democrats don't support comprehensive energy solutions; conference calls and ads are in the works. Biden may have opposed the technology in the primaries--he's on record as saying "clean-coal... is not the route to go in the United States"--but he should probably brush up on his briefing books (or pay attention to his own speeches) now that his boss disagrees. 

Don't get me wrong. I think that the GOP should take a page from Chicago's book and stop sequestering Palin from the press and the public as if she were a show pony instead of a potential vice president. And I hate that "gaffes"--often little more than trivialities--tend to dominate the political conversation in this country. But Biden's latest spree is more than an irrelevant testament to his uncontrollable verbosity. It's actually making Obama's message on substantive matters like taxes, energy, AIG and McCain more difficult to hear. In an election, that hurts the candidate more than anyone else. But what happens if Obama and Biden are elected? Having a vice-president who's eager to hold forth on any subject--even when what he's saying bears no relation to administration policy--could get pretty complicated. Distracting a campaign is one thing. Distracting a president, a political party and, by extension, the country? Awkward doesn't quite cover it.

In the primaries, the senator showed an admirable sense of self-conscious restraint. Asked during the first Democratic debate whether he'd have the "discipline" he'd "need on the world stage," Biden delivered the perfect answer: "Yes." Nothing more, nothing less.

Obama might want to remind him of that exchange the next time they talk.

In the latest print edition of NEWSWEEK, atheist author Sam Harris and former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson duke it out over the question of whether Sarah Palin is experienced enough to be president. I weighed in on the topic earlier this month, writing that "when it comes to the length and atypicality of their resumes, Palin and Obama are pretty similar... Where they differ is in what kind of experience they have--and how that experience resonates with the people already inclined to support them." As a way of advancing and expanding the debate, I thought it'd be worthwhile to post key excerpts from the Harris and Gerson essays, which are among the best I've read on Palin. Let me know what you think; the comments are all yours.

HARRIS: The point to be lamented is not that Sarah Palin comes from outside Washington, or that she has glimpsed so little of the earth's surface (she didn't have a passport until last year), or that she's never met a foreign head of state. The point is that she comes to us, seeking the second most important job in the world, without any intellectual training relevant to the challenges and responsibilities that await her. There is nothing to suggest that she even sees a role for careful analysis or a deep understanding of world events when it comes to deciding the fate of a nation. In her interview with Gibson, Palin managed to turn a joke about seeing Russia from her window into a straight-faced claim that Alaska's geographical proximity to Russia gave her some essential foreign-policy experience. Palin may be a perfectly wonderful person, a loving mother and a great American success story—but she is a beauty queen/sports reporter who stumbled into small-town politics, and who is now on the verge of stumbling into, or upon, world history.

The problem, as far as our political process is concerned, is that half the electorate revels in Palin's lack of intellectual qualifications. When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. "They think they're better than you!" is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. "Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!" Yes, all too ordinary.

We have all now witnessed apparently sentient human beings, once provoked by a reporter's microphone, saying things like, "I'm voting for Sarah because she's a mom. She knows what it's like to be a mom." Such sentiments suggest an uncanny (and, one fears, especially American) detachment from the real problems of today. The next administration must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security … the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them.

GERSON: The response in some quarters to the selection of Palin was sneering. An Obama spokesman immediately called her the "former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign-policy experience." But claims about the importance of experience are inherently complicated for both parties in this election. If Palin's governing résumé is thin, Barack Obama's is thinner. If Palin's lack of experience is meaningless, Obama's case to be commander in chief is strengthened.

But the accusation here is not really that Palin lacks experience; it is that she lacks the right experience. She attended the University of Idaho, entered a beauty contest, joined the NRA and a church where people speak in tongues and was elected to govern a state with few Starbucks. Obama rose quickly from Columbia to Harvard Law, taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago and joined the most exclusive club in America, the Senate. Even with no governing experience, he can claim what might be called "elite experience." And this is enough for elitists...

Presidential historians count experience as one possible contributing element to presidential success—but there are others. "Experience matters," historian Robert Dallek has said, "but its importance is terribly overstated." Predicting the ideal combination of background, skills and values in a successful president—or VP—is no easy task. And it cannot be argued that elite experience is somehow the key.

Americans who support Palin are not fools, peasants or theocrats. They have reasons, which elites may not agree with, but cannot dismiss. Many are attracted to her because she embodies the values of the American West, which they find superior to the values of coastal elites. This was part of the appeal of Goldwater and Reagan—a log-splitting, range-riding conservatism that emphasizes freedom. (Palin adds moose hunting to the list.) It's not irrational or simplistic for voters to prefer candidates who reflect their deepest values.

To others Palin represents a different kind of feminism—feminism without liberalism. Many women seem enthusiastic about supporting a woman leader who struggles with the balance of work and family, takes on the old-boy network and yet rejects the agenda of the National Organization for Women. And Palin appeals to many voters as a pro-life symbol, with a family—including a son with Down syndrome—that exemplifies a culture of life. Elites may dismiss this as trivial or backward. But there's no deeper question of political philosophy than this: whom do we count as a member of the human family and protect as our own? Palin welcomed a disabled child—the kind of child often targeted for elimination through eugenic abortion. It's not irrational for Americans to support a candidate who is willing to protect the weak.

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

THE DEATH OF POLICY
(Michael Gerson, via Politico Playbook)
[I]t is President Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, by proposing the massive government purchase of bad debt, who have assumed the mantle of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is John McCain and Barack Obama who are playing the role of Roosevelt's more timid, forgotten foils, ‘Martin, Barton and Fish.’ Having last week criticized the role of the Federal Reserve in bailouts -- demonstrating a tin ear of elephantine proportions -- McCain now calls for a bipartisan oversight board to review the government's rescue attempt. Mankind perishes. The world grows dark. McCain calls for a review board. Obama has been no better, responding with his usual mix of caution and blame. … The 2008 presidential campaign has become notable for its vacuity … It did not begin this way. Early in the campaign, McCain talked about his un-Republican environmental views and undertook a national poverty tour that brought him to places such as Gee's Bend, Ala., and Inez, Ky. Obama endorsed the outlines of Bush's faith-based agenda and stated in a Father's Day speech at an African-American church: "We need (fathers) to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child -- it's the courage to raise one." But those sparks of originality and outreach have been doused.

OBAMA'S OPENING
(John Heilemann, New York)
The financial crisis is almost certainly not over, and its fallout will be with us for years to come. But the story line of the campaign is about to pivot to foreign policy and national security. Why? Because those are the topics on the agenda at the first Obama-McCain debate this coming Friday at Ole Miss. A lucky break for McCain, I hear you saying, a chance to move the debate to ground that favors him. And you may be right... Whatever happens, Obama will be in no position to complain, for the impending alteration in the substantive terrain was of his own making. Last November, the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates decreed that the first of this year’s three nationally televised mano-a-manos... would be on domestic policy. But when the Obama and McCain high commands hammered out the details this summer, the Obama campaign plumped for switching the topics of the first and third debates... Given McCain’s perceived advantage on national security, the most obvious interpretation of the Obama team’s motives was a desire to get past their toughest challenge first, play for a tie, and then move on to progressively firmer soil. But from what I can glean from people in Obama’s orbit, this was not their thinking. “Obama is really confident on foreign policy, doesn’t see it as a weakness at all,” says one friend of his. “He wants this debate, and thinks he can win it big.”

A SCRAPPY FIGHTER, MCCAIN HONED HIS DEBATING STYLE IN AND OUT OF POLITICS
(Katharine Q. Seelye, New York Times)
Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, heads into the first debate on Friday with a track record as a scrappy combatant and the instincts of a fighter pilot, prepared to take out his opponent and willing to take risks to do so.  He has used fairly consistent techniques during his roughly 30 debates on the national stage: he is an aggressive competitor who scolds his opponents, grins when he scores and is handy with the rhetorical shiv. Just ask Mitt Romney, whom Mr. McCain filleted on several occasions in debates during the primaries, perhaps most infuriatingly for Mr. Romney when Mr. McCain misleadingly asserted that Mr. Romney favored a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. A review of several of Mr. McCain’s debates shows that he is most comfortable and authentic when the subject is foreign policy. And in a stroke of good fortune, foreign policy is the topic for Friday, the first of three 90-minute debates with Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee. Voters give higher marks to Mr. McCain as a potential commander in chief, and Mr. Obama should expect Mr. McCain to question his credentials for the job at every turn — and to distort his views, as Mr. Romney insisted he did. Mr. McCain is likely to steer the conversation, as he has in past debates, to his captivity in Vietnam. It was the bedrock experience of his life and is the organizing principle of his political identity.

PRISONER OF WAR
(Rob Draper, GQ)
Though the election in November may ultimately turn on the economy or voters’ doubts about Obama, John McCain and his campaign have expended considerable effort in encouraging voters to see McCain as the Warrior Who Got Things Right—the candidate who understood the realities on the ground in Iraq and had the guts to describe them as they were. And indeed, in revisiting McCain’s trips to the country, a portrait emerges of an intellectually curious, incisive, energetic, and courageous politician whose leadership style would depart significantly from that of the highly unpopular George W. Bush. But McCain’s Iraq narrative also reveals less flattering traits. If it’s fair to credit McCain with sounding the alarm about Iraq’s security crisis and the need for more troops, it’s equally legitimate to question why he relentlessly agitated for war with so little thought given to the postwar challenges. It’s also worthwhile to wonder why he paid so little heed to respected Senate colleagues like fellow Republican Chuck Hagel and Democrats Jack Reed and Joe Biden... Senators on both sides of the aisle had for months been saying precisely what McCain apparently heard for the first time from the British lieutenant colonel in Basra. Why hadn’t he listened to them? The answer seems to be that for better or for worse, the prideful nature of the man is such that McCain trusts no one’s experience as much as his own.

MCCAIN'S QUEEN OF HEARTS INTERVENTION
(George Will, Washington Post)
Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either. It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

THE ESTABLISHMENT LIVES!
(David Brooks, New York Times)
Over the next few years, the U.S. will have to climb out from under mountainous piles of debt. Many predict a long, gray recession. The country will not turn to free-market supply-siders. Nor will it turn to left-wing populists. It will turn to the safe heads from the investment banks... The government will be much more active in economic management (pleasing a certain sort of establishment Democrat). Government activism will provide support to corporations, banks and business and will be used to shore up the stable conditions they need to thrive (pleasing a certain sort of establishment Republican). Tax revenues from business activities will pay for progressive but business-friendly causes — investments in green technology, health care reform, infrastructure spending, education reform and scientific research. If you wanted to devise a name for this approach, you might pick the phrase economist Arnold Kling has used: Progressive Corporatism. We’re not entering a phase in which government stands back and lets the chips fall. We’re not entering an era when the government pounds the powerful on behalf of the people. We’re entering an era of the educated establishment, in which government acts to create a stable — and often oligarchic — framework for capitalist endeavor. After a liberal era and then a conservative era, we’re getting a glimpse of what comes next.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...

A lot was happening on the campaign trail yesterday. Barack Obama was stumping in Charlotte. John McCain was speaking in Baltimore. And America's entire financial infrastructure was continuing to, you know, "melt down."

But what did I receive the most emails from Democrats about? McCain's automobiles.

I suppose that my employer is partially to blame for the flurry of messages (there were two from the Obama campaign and two more from the DNC; *UPDATE, Sept. 23: Now Team Obama is airing an ad on the subject, above, in Michigan*). In this week's print edition of NEWSWEEK, Keith Naughton and Hilary Shenfeld report that the McCain family owns a total of 13 cars, including a few foreign imports: a 2005 Volkswagen convertible; a 2001 Honda sedan; a Lexus with Ms BUD vanity plates; and a Toyota Prius. This opened the door to the predictable flood of criticism about McCain not buying American, which was exacerbated by the fact that McCain told a Detroit TV station in September that he's "bought American literally all [his] life." In a conference call organized by the Democratic party, United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger blasted McCain for not being truthful with voters. "When he's in the midwest, he tells voters he supports the industry," Gettelfinger said. "That's really a nice campaign line. But it turns out that John McCain wasn't being straight with the people of Detroit."

I get that the Democratic Party is excited by anything that suggest McCain is either a) a dissembler or b) a wealthy person. But this is a pretty exaggerated charge by any measure. Does owning 13 cars evoke images of "champagne wishes and caviar dreams"? Absolutely. But it's not news that McCain is "rich" and "famous." The important thing to examine here is whether McCain's fleet actually says anything damning about him as a person or politician. And I really don't think it does. First of all, only one car is registered in McCain's name: an American-made 2004 Cadillac CTS. The rest are registered to his beer-heiress wife Cindy, which probably means that either she or the children drive them (mostly while McCain is away in Washington) and that the senator had very little to do with the purchases. Secondly, Toyota and Honda both have plants in America; Volkswagen is opening one in Tennessee soon. So it's not a total loss for the American worker--although I realize that the folks in Michigan won't see it that way. What's more,  "I bought American" may mean, as the New Republic's Jonathan Chait notes, that McCain "buys American cars in addition to others, not that he buys American cars exclusively." And finally, the fact that the McCains own nine American-made vehicles actually means that they've pumped more money in the U.S. auto industry than the Obamas, who only own one (a 2008 Ford Escape hybrid). All in all, I'd call it a wash.

That said, I can understand why the Dems were delighted with their little distraction. In the primaries, the two candidates (Sam Brownback and Tom Tancredo) who confessed to owning imported cars (a Honda Civic and a Toyota Prius and a Mercedes, respectively) were among the first to go. And in 2004, it wasn't Laura Bush who admitted to driving a 1995 British-made Land Rover Defender. It was Teresa Heinz Kerry. And we all know what a smooth ride that turned out to be. 

Breaking news! The McCain campaign thinks the press is "a pro-Obama advocacy organization that every day attacks the McCain campaign, attacks Senator McCain, attacks Governor Palin, and excuses Senator Obama." Or at least that's what chief strategist Steve Schmidt told a bunch of reporters--I mean, "pro-Obama advocates"--on a conference call this morning.

I sympathize. I really do. In fact, I sympathize so much that when McCain's speechwriter, co-author and alter ego Mark Salter made a similar complaint last week--that the press was not applying "the same standard" of factchecking to Obama's latest ads and attacks as it was applying to McCain's--I sifted through the evidence and found that "the guy's got a point." You can read my analysis of Obama's misleading messaging here. 

But there are limits to my sympathy--and with this morning's rant, Schmidt may have crossed that line. Here's why. When people on either side of the political spectrum make these claims--whether they manage presidential campaigns or spend their precious time commenting on Stumper items--they're usually latching onto a single unfavorable story to make a sweeping generalization about the entire "media establishment." In this case, Schmidt was using this morning's report that McCain campaign manager Rick Davis "was paid more than $30,000 a month for five years as president of an advocacy group set up by the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to defend them against stricter regulations" to argue that the New York Times is "not by any standard a journalistic organization." "[It's] completely, totally, 150 percent in the tank for the Democratic candidate," he said. As an example of this imbalance, Schmidt accused the Times of failing to report that "[Joe Biden's] son is a lobbyist for the credit card and banking industry."

The only problem? The Times has reported on Hunter Biden's work as a lobbyist. Twice. (Incidentally, MBNA hired Biden as a consultant--not a lobbyist. But that's another story.) What's more, the newspaper has printed "more than 40" "probing stories... over the course of the campaign about Barack Obama, his life, his religion, his childhood, his politics, his time in the state senate, his time in the U.S. Senate, his family, his religion, his friends, his fundraising and all other manner of associations"--at least according to the Obama campaign, which took the unusual step this afternoon of sending reporters links to negative New York Times articles about the Illinois senator in response to Schmidt's accusation. You can read the list and draw your own conclusions.

I don't fault individual readers for seizing on isolated reports as evidence of the MSM's overarching ideological bias. It happens to me all the time. One week I'll write an item critical of McCain and a commenter will call me a "degenerate marxist." The next week someone else will say I'm a "FOX News butt boy" for criticizing Obama. Neither reader has weighed both items in their analysis--let alone the 1,400 others I've posted since last September. That's more than understandable--and it's exactly what happens on a larger scale with the media as a whole. Still, it's worth noting that groups that keep track of this stuff for us have found that the claims of pro-Obama, anti-McCain bias are wildly exaggerated. In late July, for example, the Center for Media and Public Affairs found that on-air evaluations of Obama went from 62 percent positive during the primaries to 72 percent negative during the general election. Meanwhile, McCain's negatives fell and positives rose over the same period of time. Hardly evidence of a "pro-Obama advocacy organization."

The bottom line is that Schmidt has too much skin in this game to be credible source of media criticism. He wants to discredit any negative news about his candidate by discrediting the messenger--an easy task, given how much the masses seem to hate the MSM. He wants to shame reporters into writing critical stories about Obama to prove that they're fair and balanced. And he wants to distract the press from reporting on McCain's economic struggles by dangling a shiny object in front of their faces--in this case, a melodramatic attack on the media itself (incidentally, the media's favorite subject to cover).

More than anything else, that last goal--and Schmidt's success in achieving it, as evidenced by this very blog item as well as stories everywhere from the Politico to the Washington Post--is probably the strongest argument against his accusations of ideological bias. For the record, I think there's a lot of bias in the mainstream media. It's a huge problem, in fact. But the issue isn't ideology. No reporter I've ever met sits around scheming about how to get his or her favored candidate elected. Do they have private political beliefs? I'm sure. Do these preferences occasionally skew their work? No doubt. But as a rule, reporters spend too much time with politicians to feel anything but skepticism. The really damaging bias is narrative in nature--bias for tension, bias for conflict, bias for drama. Which is why when Schmidt and Co. release a misleading ad about Obama that's not actually airing on TV, the cable newsniks air it for them. Or why we jump to cover Schmidt's histrionic attack on the Times instead of focusing on McCain's economic speech in Scranton. Schmidt knows how the MSM works, and he's doing a brilliant job--far better than Team Obama--of capitalizing on its weaknesses. I'd tell him to stop whining if it weren't such an effective part of his strategy.

UPDATE, 5:47 p.m: The Huffington Post reports:

For a party that rails against the New York Times, the Republicans sure depend on the Grey Lady to score political points. Since the end of the primary, John McCain's campaign has sent at least 60 emails to its rapid response list that reference the New York Times. They have used the paper to repeatedly knock Obama for voting "present" in the Illinois State Senate. They have used it to defend McCain's record on Jack Abramoff, to accuse Obama of flip-flopping on Iraq, and to bolster the case for vice presidential pick Sarah Palin. "New York Times: Governor Palin 'Took Intense Criticism From Members Of Her Own Party For Turning The Spotlight On The Failures Of Alaska Republicans,'" read one McCain campaign press release.

The only thing dumber than throwing a stone from your glass abode? Throwing a boomerang.

Someone should tell John McCain. In presidential politics, negative attacks are pretty much par for the course. As long as they're not lies--as both McCain's and Barack Obama's have been of late--then there's not much point wringing your hands, rending your garments and/or gnashing your teeth in protest. Even then, there's probably little political price to pay for misleading the electorate; it takes a lot for casual voters to punish a liar at the polls. That said, over the past week Team McCain has perfected a new kind of political attack that should offend the sensibilities of campaign junkies everywhere--simply because it's so counterproductive. First, McCain chastises Obama for committing a sin that he himself has committed. Then Obama points this out, distracting voters from his own foibles and refocusing the spotlight on McCain. For Obama, the impact of the attack is immediately negated. But for McCain it's doubled: he ends up looking both a) guilty of whatever he accused Obama of and b) totally hypocritical.

I've counted at least three of these "Boomerang Attacks" in the past few days. The first came last Friday with the release of "Nothing New," a web ad slamming Obama for not saying "whether he supported or opposed the government-backed rescue of insurance giant AIG." The point, of course, was to portray Obama as an indecisive neophyte unprepared for the presidency. A "true leader," the ad implied--a leader like, say, John McCain--would've taken a bold and unequivocal stand. The only problem? McCain was even more wishy-washy on the bailout than Obama. Asked last Tuesday on "Today" whether the government should intervene in the AIG meltdown, McCain was pretty clear. "They're on their own," he said. The next day, however--after the Fed announced it would step in--McCain had softened his stance, admitting on "Good Morning America" that "there are literally millions of people whose retirement, whose investment, whose insurance were at risk." It's not that Obama was a angel here. Unlike McCain, he played the weasely Clintonian game of distinguishing between "supporting" and "not second-guessing" the $85 million bailout, even going so far as to express outrage that anyone would confuse the two positions. It's that McCain's attack gave the Illinois senator an easy opportunity to bite back--and ultimately made McCain look worse than his opponent, not better. "On Tuesday, [McCain] said the government should stand aside and allow one of the nation’s largest insurers AIG, to collapse... despite the possibility that it would put millions of Americans at risk," Obama told a crowd of thousands at a northern New Mexico rally last Thursday. "But by Wednesday, he changed his mind." In other words, I'll see your indecision, Senator--and raise you one whole flip-flop, with a little bit of hypocrisy to sweeten the pot.

You'd think Team McCain would've learned its lesson. Apparently not. Hot on the heels of the AIG onslaught came an even more hypocritical attack from Crystal City--this one regarding Obama's ties to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the failed mortgage behemoths. In a pair of ads ("Jim Johnson" and "Advice") and a speech Friday in Green Bay, Wisc., McCain pilloried Obama for associating with former Fannie Mae CEOs Jim Johnson and Franklin Raines. "While Fannie Mae was betraying the public trust, somehow its former CEO [Johnson] had managed to gain my opponent's trust to the point that Senator Obama actually put him in charge of his vice presidential search," said McCain. "Another CEO for Fannie Mae, Mr. Raines, has been advising Senator Obama on housing policy... Senator Obama may be taking their advice and he may be taking their money, but in a McCain-Palin administration, there will be no seat for these people at the policy-making table. They won't even get past the front gate at the White House."

Never mind the fact that Raines never actually advised Obama on anything. The real problem here is that McCain's campaign is swarming with 26 advisers or fundraisers who have lobbied for Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac--including nearly a dozen who lobby right now. As the Washington Monthly's Steve Benen wrote last week, "one of McCain's top policy advisers, Charlie Black, was lobbyist for Freddie Mac for 10 years, while his campaign manager, Rick Davis, lobbied to help Fannie and Freddie steer clear of additional federal regulations [and earned $2 million in the process]... Tom Loeffler, who serves McCain's campaign co-chairman, also lobbied for Fannie Mae. Aquiles Suarez, a McCain economic adviser, was a Fannie Mae executive. Dan Crippen, a McCain adviser who helped craft the campaign's health-care policy, lobbied for Fannie Mae (and Merrill Lynch). Arthur B. Culvahouse, who helped lead McCain's VP search committee, also lobbied for Fannie Mae." According to former Fannie Mae executive William Maloni, "photographs of Sen. McCain's staff... loo[k] to me like the team of lobbyists who used to report to me." Without these ties--which are far more extensive than Obama's--McCain would have every right to say that associating with officials from troubled financial institutions is a sign of bad judgment. Again, it's not like Obama's hands are spotless. But with them, McCain offers Obama an otherwise unavailable opportunity to remind voters that McCain's own judgment--at least by McCain's own standards--is worse. So much for "no seat... at the table."

With this brief history in mind, I'm betting that McCain's latest attack ad--the start of a new effort to transform Obama "into a scheming insider-urban-machine politician," according to the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder--will backfire as well. Called "Chicago Machine," it's meant to distract the media--and the electorate--from the latest economic news by resurrecting stories about Obama's ties to "unsavory" Chicago figures like Mayor William Daley, Governor Ron Blagojevich, State Senator Emil Jones and developer Tony Rezko. Leaving aside questions of whether any of these links are relevant--Obama was opportunistic and ambitious in Chicago, but "corrupt" is a tough sell--I suspect that McCain's attack has opened the door for Obama to launch a rather obvious counteroffensive of his own: on Washington, D.C. Obama could call McCain a creature of the capital--yet again. Or he could remind voters that McCain was actually, you know, involved in a real political scandal related to financial regulation (unlike Obama himself). Either way, the Republican nominee has given his rival yet another chance to say "I know you are"--in this case, part of an unethical politician culture--"but what am I?" And while Chicago may be shady, it's nowhere near as radioactive as Washington, D.C.

Beware of falling glass.

UPDATE, 3:53 p.m.: That was fast. In an email to reporters, Obama spokesman Bill Burton plays the Keating Card:

# of stories the NY Times has written over the course of the campaign about the last major financial regulatory crisis, resulting in a huge bailout, and which John McCain was centrally involved in with his political godfather Charles Keating: 0

The point here is not that McCain should be tarred with Keating. Far from it. As Ben Smith notes, "the Keating Five scandal... is hardly a secret. Indeed, the story is central to McCain's political narrative. He's called his actions a mistake, and the episode is what transformed him into a self-styled reformer." It's that accusing Obama of Chicago-style corruption provides Democrats with the opportunity to revive a scandal that otherwise would've had no reason to enter the conversation--and that could ultimately hurt McCain more than it hurts Obama.

As my NEWSWEEK colleague Jonathan Darman writes in the latest dead-tree mag, Rovean tactics alone do not win the Republican Party elections. This is a center-right country--and Democrats ignore that fact at their own peril. Excerpts:

To Democrats it simply does not make sense. The past eight years, with Republicans in control of the White House, have, they say, been disastrous for America. The military is beleaguered and beaten down after two long and taxing wars. The nation, they go on, has been disgraced in the eyes of the world. The economy has collapsed. The financial system is broken. Eighty percent of voters believe the nation is on the wrong track. Yet, a month and a half before the November election, the Democratic nominee for the presidency only slightly leads the Republican standard bearer in most polls. The GOP, in spite of everything, might somehow be able to hold on to power.

How could this possibly be? Surely, anxious Democrats have told themselves, only a nefarious plot could have gotten us here. The Republicans cannot win this election on the issues, they reason, so they have set out to win it the way they always do—by distraction, division and lies. They will paint Democrats as out-of-touch elitists on the wrong side of the culture war, and a country that doesn't know better will accept their fabrication whole hog. The only way to win this election is to beat the Republicans at their own game. This is the way it works in modern presidential politics: Democrats run on ideas and issues, Republicans run on Karl Rove.

But this paranoid view, that Roveism alone wins campaigns for the GOP, cannot fully explain a simple reality: for 40 years, Republicans have won the presidency more often than not. The GOP has won seven of the past 10 presidential elections. Republican candidates have won more than 400 electoral votes in four separate elections... Jimmy Carter is the only Democratic presidential candidate in 44 years to win 50 percent of the popular vote. If this phenomenal Republican record is thanks only to the dirty tricks of Karl Rove (or Lee Atwater, or Richard Nixon before him), then surely our political system is so easily subverted by treachery that a revolution is required.

It is not. History shows that the modern Republican Party has had more going for it than just Karl Rove: for 40 years, it has been the conservative party in an essentially conservative nation. In this era, Democrats have managed to win the White House only when they have presented themselves as centrist stewards of the center-right consensus. They have lost when they let Republicans get under their skin.

Ideas have always done more for the modern Republican Party than critics on the left would care to admit. It is true that Nixon, a paranoid cynic convinced that only ruthlessness could win him the White House, was the first president of this center-right era. But he won the White House in 1968 and again in 1972 because he offered an effective alternative to the New Deal consensus that government could help mankind be its better self—a consensus that had been discredited by the decline of the postwar boom, the failure of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and an American military defeat. Nixon's ruthlessness, laid bare in Watergate, unmade his presidency, but did not make it. George H.W. Bush won the White House not because of the tawdry Willie Horton ad but because he convinced the country he was the only candidate ready to be president in an unknown post-cold-war world. George W. Bush won the White House not simply by Swift-Boating John Kerry but by convincing voters that only Bush could keep them safe.

Similarly, the Democratic candidates who have managed to win the White House, Carter and Clinton, have surveyed a center-right nation and concluded: "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Conservatives today may call Carter a socialist, but he ran for the presidency as a Southern Baptist outsider, intent on reining in a reckless government. Bill Clinton was the most easy-to-slime Democratic candidate in modern history, but also the most naturally centrist...

Barack Obama belongs to a different era than Carter and Clinton, and in many ways he has a more interesting opportunity. The past eight years, after all, have brought the shortcomings and inconsistencies of the center-right consensus to the fore. The benefits of prolonged economic growth have not trickled down to average workers. The federal government's massive Wall Street bailout is, in essence, the surrender of the notion that unbridled capitalism could provide for the general good. For the first time in 40 years, the left has a real chance to sway the center's notion of the proper role of the state. With six weeks left in the campaign, Democrats will find more luck imagining this new consensus than they will in imagining the evils of Karl Rove.

READ THE REST HERE.

Photo Credits, clockwise from top: Frazza/AFP-Getty Images, Robbins/AP, AP, Ommanney/Getty Images for Newsweek, Robert Maass/Corbis

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories. (FYI: I'm on the road right now, so I'll be getting a slightly later start on posting than usual. Thanks for reading, Andrew)

POLICIES SOUND THE SAME, BUT GOALS ARE DIFFERENT
(John Harwood, New York Times)
The economic crisis has snapped voters’ attention back to the alternative visions of Senators Barack Obama and John McCain, which sometimes sound the same, but are not... The staunch free-market philosophy shared by leading Republicans has lost its luster, leaving Americans jittery about their savings and both parties racing to bail out Wall Street. In characteristic Democratic fashion, Mr. Obama would temper free-market zeal with more government regulation, a redistribution of the tax burden to benefit middle- and working-class families at the expense of the affluent, and increased federal spending on health care, education, energy and infrastructure. He offers a change in ideology. By contrast, Mr. McCain seeks to tap voters’ anger at the way Washington works or doesn’t work, with its partisan rancor, nonstop money chase and failure to tackle national problems... Mr. McCain has displayed a rare talent and inclination for bucking partisan orthodoxy in search of solutions, most conspicuously in his successful push for campaign finance reform and his unsuccessful push for comprehensive new immigration legislation. The reform he offers points largely toward the process of governing and the possibility of bipartisan breakthroughs on such intractable issues as immigration, climate change and potential insolvency of Medicare and Social Security.

SURVEY: RACIAL ATTITUDES COST OBAMA
(Ron Fournier, Associated Press) Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Sen. Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an Associated Press -Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks - many calling them "lazy," "violent" or responsible for their own troubles. The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Mr. Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 - about 2.5 percentage points. A model derived from the poll results suggested that these problems could cost Mr. Obama up to six percentage points of support. The findings suggest that Mr. Obama's problem is close to home - among his fellow Democrats, particularly non-Hispanic white voters. Just seven in 10 people who call themselves Democrats support Mr. Obama, compared to the 85 percent of self-identified Republicans who back Mr. McCain.

THE RACE DISCUSSION OBAMA DIDN'T WANT
(Ben Smith, Politico) The national conversation appears to have arrived. Racial considerations that have long been palpable in southern Ohio and other crucial regions are again in the foreground. A new poll that accompanied a much buzzed-about Associated Press article on Saturday appears to starkly quantify the cost of racism to Obama: 6 percentage points in the polls. And Friday's debate will bring the campaign to the Deep South and offer the symbolism of an integrated debate at Ole Miss, the scene of a brutal battle over integration a generation ago. That conversation creates a moment with risks for both candidates — though perhaps greater risks for Obama. Many Democrats see the explicit discussion of race and politics as almost unambiguously negative for Obama, a reminder to voters of fraught questions of identity and a distraction from the economic troubles that have dominated the headlines in recent days and could bury Obama's rival, Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee.

NO TIME FOR POLITICS OF THE PLAYGROUND
(Clive Crook, Financial Times)
What about rallying round in a crisis? Before the situation worsened last week, both campaigns had already taken on a stridently negative tone. The financial emergency only reinforced this, giving no impetus whatever to the pragmatic, post-partisan consensus-seeking that both men once espoused and that the situation so urgently demands. They left that to Congress. For Mr Obama, what has happened is not so much a result of specific regulatory failures (of which there have been plenty) but a wholesale failure of the enemy ideology... Mr McCain, likewise playing to stereotype, sounded loud populist notes about greed on Wall Street and (again) the need for change in Washington. Both men continue to accuse the other of lies, distortions and gratuitous insults. This now constitutes the bulk of each campaign’s television advertising. Welcome to the new politics. Given the timing, Mr Obama and Mr McCain were bound to seem irrelevant to the task of stabilising the financial system, even though important principles are at stake in that effort. But whichever of them wins in November, the fallout from this emergency will probably cloud the next administration’s first two years in office. It would be good to see some dawning of this reality in remaining weeks before the election.

STAND-INS, NAPS HELP DEBATE PREPARATION
(Monica Langley, Wall Street Journal)
To get in the debating mood, Republican John McCain will host a town-hall event and take a short nap. His rival, Democrat Barack Obama, will work out or shoot hoops. And to prepare, Sen. McCain will spar this week in mock debates with Michael Steele. Mr. Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland and a prominent black Republican, will play Sen. Obama and use many of his speaking patterns, tactics and body language. Sen. Obama will practice with Greg Craig, a Washington lawyer and former official in the Clinton administration who is one of his few gray-haired advisers. After weeks of TV attack ads and prepared remarks on the stump, the candidates will face off on stage without teleprompters or advisers. With the presidential race in a near dead heat, neither candidate can afford a costly gaffe that sends his campaign into a tailspin... Each campaign is seeking even the smallest advantage. Obama advisers, for example, are considering how to provoke Sen. McCain into anger or showing what they say is how out of touch, or old, he is. Advisers have told Sen. McCain to watch out when Sen. Obama uses the phrase, "As I've said before..." One McCain adviser said it is used "when Obama actually changes his position, to pretend it's what he's always said."

On her Lab Notes blog, Sharon Begley looks at a study that shows an increasing partisan divide on Global Warming:

Hard to believe, but Republicans once took the lead in environmental protection and conservation: Richard Nixon proposed the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the law establishing it in 1970. George Bush (#41) signed an important extension of the Clean Air Act in 1990 and made the U.S. a signatory to the international treaty that paved the way for the Kyoto Treaty on climate change. Theodore Roosevelt pioneered the creation of the country’s national parks.

Then there is today.

In an eye-opening essay in Environment magazine, two scholars examine the partisan divide on the leading environmental issue of the day, global warming. Sociologists Riley E. Dunlap of Oklahoma State University and Aaron M. McCright of Michigan State University trace this to the Reagan administration’s calling environmental regulations a burden on the economy and to the anti-environmental bent of the Republicans who took control of Congress (led by Newt Gingrich) in 1994. But a partisan divide that was originally most apparent among “political elites, such as members of Congress, who tend to be more ideologically polarized than the general public,” has now spread, the authors write. As recently as the mid-1990s Democratic voters supported increased spending on environmental protection at rates only 10 percent higher than self-identified Republicans, but that gap is now a chasm.

READ THE FULL POST HERE

 

During the flight yesterday afternoon from Grand Rapids, Mich. to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Steve Schmidt, Mark Salter and Nicole Wallace pulled back the curtain--or two--separating business-class cabin of John McCain's Straight Talk Air from the traveling press corps' coach accommodations and spent some time talking to a small pool of reporters. Much of what they said was standard talking-point stuff: swipes at Obama's response to the current financial crisis; explanations of McCain's plan to reform Social Security; a preview of the campaign's upcoming economic policy rollout. But one thing Salter said stood out, at least to me. Referring to the media's recent round of McCain-centric factchecking and hand-wringing--Time's Joe Klein called one of the senator's new spots "the sleaziest... I've ever seen in presidential politics"--Salter demanded that the same level of scrutiny be applied to Obama's latest ads and attacks. "Never litigated," he said. "Never litigated on the front page of your paper. Or anywhere else. Just ours. Just ours. All we’re asking is for the same standard."

My first inclination was to dismiss Salter's complaint as part of Team McCain's ongoing effort to discredit all criticism of its candidate by discrediting the messenger--i.e., the MSM. There's no doubt that strategic objectives--read: stoking the fires of resentment among the media-hating masses--partially account for Salter's accusations of "unfairness." That said, a quick tour of Obama's current anti-McCain messaging efforts make it clear that, whatever the convenience of the claim, the guy's got a point. And that doesn't bode well for the next president--whoever he is.

The most egregious example of Obama's shifting strategy is a new Spanish-language ad called "Dos Caras." Airing in the crucial Southwestern swing states of Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, the spot attempts to equate McCain with Rush Limbaugh on immigration. As a picture of the conservative talk-radio host appears onscreen beneath a pair of bigoted-sounding quotes--"Mexicans are stupid and unqualified" and "Shut your mouth or get out"--the announcer says that "they want us to forget the insults we've put up with, the intolerance." He continues:  "They made us feel marginalized in a country we love so much. 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 failed policies of George Bush."

The main problem here is that tying McCain to Limbaugh--especially on immigration reform--is deeply unfair. It's not just that McCain broke with his party and nearly torpedoed his presidential bid by co-sponsoring last year's failed comprehensive reform bill at the same time Limbaugh was regularly lambasting immigration reform and expressing hostility toward illegal immigrants on the air. It's that Limbaugh actually opposed McCain's candidacy because of his stance on immigration. He still doesn't care for the Arizona senator. What's more, the quotes from Limbaugh are taken out of context. As ABC News' Jake Tapper points out, the "larger point" of the first one--while "not one of [Limbaugh's] most eloquent moments, to be sure"--was that "NAFTA would mean that unskilled stupid Mexicans would be doing the jobs of unskilled stupid Americans."  Offensive, sure--but consider it an equal-opportunity slur. The second quote, meanwhile, was part of a riff mocking Mexican law--not a call to Mexicans "get out" of America. To imply that McCain agrees with these twisted quotes when he doesn't even agree with Limbaugh on immigration is absurd. Has McCain moderated his immigration rhetoric for political reasons? Absolutely. But even blogger Andrew Sullivan--Obama's No. 1 fan--says that "Dos Caras" crosses the line. "Playing racial politics this way is not what Obama promised to do," he wrote yesterday. "Cut it out."

Obama's other offenses are less outrageous--but they're misleading all the same. In response to a new McCain ad that tries to saddle Obama with disgraced former Fannie Mae chief Franklin Raines by claiming that Raines has given Obama "advice on mortgage and housing policy," Obama spokesman Bill Burton unleashed a howitzer blast of outrage in Crystal City's general direction. "This is another flat-out lie from a dishonorable campaign that is increasingly incapable of telling the truth," he said. "Frank Raines has never advised Senator Obama about anything--ever." That might be true. But the problem is that it contradicts a July Washington Post profile of Raines (cited by McCain in the ad), which reported that Raines has "taken calls from Barack Obama's presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters." As the New Republic's Jason Zengerle--another Obama supporter--concludes: "Seeing as how neither Raines nor the Obama campaign bothered to contradict that information when the article came out, and didn't do so until only after the McCain ad aired, you can't really blame the McCain campaign for trying to make hay of the situation. And you certainly can't accuse it of dishonorably telling a lie."

Then there's whole "McCain supported tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas" line of attack. Constantly repeated in Obama and Biden's stump speeches, the riff reappears in a new ad called "Sold Us Out" that accuses McCain of "selling out" American workers. The spot makes McCain sound as if he's offering a special tax break for companies to move jobs offshore. But as the nonpartisan researchers at Politfact.com have noted, "that's not quite how it works." While it's true that McCain has voted to retain a long-standing principle of the U.S. tax system that allows companies that keep their profits overseas to defer domestic taxation indefinitely, the only actual "tax break" that McCain is currently proposing is one that would lower the top corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent. According to his advisers, that cut would actually encourage U.S. companies to return home. "If the tax rate were lowered on businesses in this country, businesses would bring money back," Carly Fiorina recently told ABC. "The reason they cannot bring money back is because the tax rate is so high." (Incidentally, Obama has indicated that he'd be open to reducing the coporate tax rate as well.) Agree or not with Fiorina's reasoning, the bottom line is that it's "not really" true--Politifact's words, not mine--to suggest that McCain "supports tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas." Which is exactly what Obama is doing.

Last but not least is regulation. On the stump yesterday in New Mexico, Obama called McCain a new convert to the cause. "When I was warning about the danger ahead on Wall Street months ago because of the lack of oversight," he said, "Senator McCain was telling the Wall Street Journal -- and I quote -- 'I'm always for less regulation.'" There's definitely some truth here, as I wrote earlier this week; not only has "McCain has dramatically ramped up the regulatory rhetoric in the wake of the meltdown on Wall Street... [but] Obama made the argument about the need for increased oversight much earlier." In general, McCain has taken an anti-regulatory approach to the market that's consistent with his fiscal conservatism. But as the the Washington Post editorial board pointed out this morning, Obama's attack is deceptively "one-sided." After telling the Journal in March that he was "always for less regulation," McCain was quick to add that "there is role for oversight"--especially in response to "the subprime lending crisis," where people "game[d] the system" and "engaged in unethical conduct which made this problem worse." As the Post notes,"when it comes to regulating financial institutions and corporate misconduct, Mr. McCain's record is more in keeping with his current rhetoric":

In the aftermath of the Enron collapse and other accounting scandals, he was a leader, with Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), in pushing to require that companies treat stock options granted to employees as expenses on their balance sheets. "I have long opposed unnecessary regulation of business activity, mindful that the heavy hand of government can discourage innovation," he wrote in a July 2002 op-ed in the New York Times. "But in the current climate only a restoration of the system of checks and balances that once protected the American investor -- and that has seriously deteriorated over the past 10 years -- can restore the confidence that makes financial markets work."... In 2006, he pushed for stronger regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- while Mr. Obama was notably silent.

My point here is not to claim that Obama's misleading attacks are somehow worse that McCain's. Most of this stuff is child's play compared to the whole McCain-sponsored "lipstick on a pig" kerfluffle, which I characterized as "idiotic" and "condescending." And I agree with National Journal's Stuart Taylor, Jr., that the Arizona senator "has lately been leading the race to the bottom" of the barrel. What's more, Obamans have a point when they say their man has the right to fight fire with fire. It would be political suicide for Obama to allow McCain to keep hitting below the belt without landing a few low blows himself. But that's precisely the problem. If you'll recall, the general-election campaign began with paeans to the "politics of civility" and promises from both candidates that they would "break the partisan gridlock in Washington" once elected. Now, not so much. The shift to polarization and distortion was probably inevitable. But as Peggy Noonan notes in her latest column, "it invites charges of winning bad. And if you win bad in a 50/50 nation, it makes it really hard to govern."

In other words, neither McCain nor Obama should expect to find a helping hand when he "reaches across the aisle" as president. A clenched fist is more like it.

UPDATE, Sept. 23: The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus has more, explaining why "Obama has been furthest out of line... on Social Security, stooping to the kind of scare tactics he once derided." Read the whole thing. The key idea, however, is in the kicker: "To Democrats who worry about whether their nominee is willing to do whatever it takes to win: You can calm down." Many political partisans will see this as a good thing. But there's no denying that Obama's new tactics will make bipartisanship a more elusive goal if/when he arrives in Washington--assuming that it was ever attainable to begin with.

Amid the fiscal crisis, some Dems want Obama to crank up the heat. My NEWSWEEK colleague Howard Fineman reports:

The complaint from the Democrats in the room was that Sen. Barack Obama wasn't acting enough like… well, they weren't quite sure: Robert Kennedy, maybe, or Hubert Humphrey, or Bill Clinton in the early 1990s. Obama had no fire, they said. He should be way ahead by now, they said. He needed a creative, sweeping new economic proposal, they said. Also, he needed to call them and ask them for their advice.

This was the drift at a Washington social event I attended the other night, the kind that draws senators, ambassadors and assorted know-it-alls. Even as the global economy was crumbling—a huge political boost, at least at first glance, for the out-of-power Democrats—and even though Obama has climbed back into the lead in national polls, the mood among party faithful was sober to the point of gloomy.

Typical of the sentiment was that expressed by Don Riegle, a respected former senator and congressman from Michigan. A flinty native of Flint, where they used to make Buicks (the plant is long gone) Riegle is proudly old school, the kind of guy who regards an impassioned speech in a sweaty union hall as the epitome of being a Democrat. He got wound up even as we chatted. "You've got to be able to convince working people that you'll bust through walls for them!" Riegle told me. Wall-busting determination, he said, is what Obama needed to display if he hoped to defeat Sen. John McCain. "Obama has to show that he identifies with our people. He's got to become more emotional. He has to show them that he is willing to do anything to see that people can live a better life." Riegle's suggestion: Obama goes to Michigan and stands in an unemployment line with workers —the ones laid off in the auto industry, for example. "Just stand there and talk to them," he said.

Others weren't clear what Obama should do, but they knew it was something. For John Breaux, the cagey Cajun from Louisiana who served 32 years in Congress and who is now a leading lobbyist in the capital, the chief concern was that Obama is not 20 points ahead, which he should be given the state of the economy...

But I'm wondering if there isn't method in Obama's coolness, even as he tries to amp it up a bit to suit his campaign-trail critics. First, he knows who and what he is, and Hubert Humphrey, or Jesse Jackson, Jr., for that matter, isn't it. Obama is not a shouter by nature. Authenticity counts—and so does not evoking the style of, say, Jeremiah Wright. Obama is Harvard Law; it's plain fact. And he may have decided that the best quality to project at this scary and tumultuous moment is not fire but ice, not roiling emotion but studied calm.

More important, and perhaps more to the point, he is a Hawaiian. He knows something about body surfing. He knows that the key is the wave—to spot it early, to swim out to it, to get on it and let it carry you. You don't fight it; you let its power take over.

And so Obama must feel about the global economic mess. It is a far bigger and more dangerous wave than he could have anticipated when he launched his candidacy in Springfield in February 2007. Those seem, looking back, like such innocent times. The world seems to be standing on the brink of something huge and ominous. If Obama is as smart and sober as he seems to be, he knows that the next president will face daunting challenges. There was some real fear in the room, and it had nothing to do with the Democratic Party.

I heard it when I talked to Sen. Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota. He is a low-key sort, reared in the soft-spoken ways of the Northern Plains, trained in the bleak science of accounting at Stanford University. Fiscal matters are his forte, though he never seems to get too worked up about them. His idea of high drama in the Senate is an easel with a really great bar chart. So I was taken aback the other night by how vehement and shaken Conrad seemed (I've known him for 20 years; I can detect such things).

As chairman of the Budget Committee (and ranking member on Finance as well), Conrad is plugged into the socket of the credit crisis. When I saw him he'd just been briefed—and shocked—by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. The two men had told him that, if the government had not taken over AIG Insurance, the entire economy of the United States, and much of the rest of the world, could have fallen into deep panic. Like an aggressive tumor, AIG's unsustainable insurance guarantees were spread like poisonous filigree not just in hedge funds, brokerage houses and banks, but also on the books of blue-chip corporations atop the Fortune 500. "Some very big names were in danger," he said. "They had to do what they did," Conrad explained to me. "No choice." And as we have since learned, the takeover of AIG was not enough to calm the markets. Indeed, it seemed to have had the opposite effect.

Where the Democrats blameless? Of course they weren't. Even Democrats in the room admitted it.

The bipartisan consensus was that the festival of dangerous greed began in the Clinton 90s. Democrats, abandoning their union and working-class skepticism of the markets, threw in with a new crowd of pro-business, pro-deregulation donors. Also, they countenanced an anything-goes mentality at what became the party's favorite new social-uplift tools, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The two behemoths papered the planet with cheap (and, as we now see, shaky) home mortgages, with the whole process run (and protected) by a get-rich-quick cadre of political hacks.

But the consensus in the room also was that the sordid history didn't contain enough anti-Democratic ammunition to do McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin that much good. In politics as in baseball, fans—voters—focus on what happens in the ninth inning, not the first. The Democrats whiffed on the credit crisis in the early years, but now they aren't at bat. It was President George W. Bush who nominated Paulson and Bernanke. If they strike out, it's the GOP that will lose the game.

READ THE REST HERE.

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

WHY IT'S GETTING MEAN
Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal:  Here is the tough, sad, rather deadly assumption I see rising among our media people, our thinkers, observers and chatterers, the highly sophisticated who've seen'em come and seen'em go: It is, again: What if neither of them is the right man? What if neither of them is equal to the moment?... If you are a longtime Obama supporter and are beginning now to admit to deep doubts, you can't just announce you've been wrong for the past year. You'd look like a fool... But what you can do is turn, with new rage, on the guy you've at least long opposed. So you ignore Mr. Obama and attack Mr. McCain with new ferocity. Or, if you have doubts about Mr. McCain, you ignore him and turn your heat on Mr. Obama. The Obama campaign has been one of real dignity and cool, and in this it reflected its candidate. It won't be good to see this end. It will be sad, actually. On the Republican side, the legitimate anger sparked by the media's personal attacks on Sarah Palin and her family has now been funneled, coolly and almost chillingly, into antimedia manipulation. This is no good. It may help the Republicans win, because no one likes the media. Even the media doesn't like the media. But it invites charges of winning bad. And if you win bad in a 50/50 nation, it makes it really hard to govern.

HEY, BIG SPENDER!
Jonathan Cohn, New Republic:  The subject remains so politically troublesome for Democrats. It's this idea that Obama wants to go on a spending binge--and that this binge will leave Americans worse off. Is that really so? Look closely at what Obama has proposed this election cycle. According to various press accounts, Obama's top four spending initiatives are, in order, his plans to achieve universal health coverage or something close to it; to invest in alternative energy development; to increase foreign aid; and to boost spending on education, particularly early childhood education. (Wonky side note: Not all of this "spending" is actually spending per se; sometimes it comes in the form of tax breaks.) Health care is by far the most expensive of these proposals. Obama's aides calculate it would cost $65 billion a year. (Count me among those who think the final plan will cost even more.) The rest are in the range of $10 to $25 billion a year. McCain and, more generally, conservatives would have you believe that money is simply wasted. By that, presumably, they mean it's being spent in ways that don't benefit you--or in ways that are inefficient. That's simply not the case.

FINANCIAL UPHEAVAL NARROWS OPTIONS OF NEXT U.S. PRESIDENT
Gerald Seib, Wall Street Journal: Sometimes events reshape a presidential campaign. Sometimes they reshape the world the candidates seek to lead. This week's Wall Street earthquake is such a big event that it is doing both. Much chatter is being devoted to how the market tremors are affecting the campaign -- whether they help Sen. Barack Obama by reinforcing his "change" message, whether Sen. John McCain has hurt himself with his initial declaration that the fundamentals of the economy remain sound, and so forth. Here's the more important reality: Already, even before it is fully played out, the crisis means the next president -- that would be President Obama or President McCain -- will enter office with handcuffs on. Options are being reduced for the next president every day, as the real and psychological costs of the crisis mount. Consider just some of the ripple effects.

FOR RIVALS, FINANCE CRISIS IS POSING ON-THE-FLY TESTS
Jackie Calmes and Jeff Zeleny, New York Times: The financial crisis has turned the race between Senators John McCain and Barack Obama into an audition for who could best handle a national economic emergency. Mr. McCain, the Republican nominee for president, called on President Bush on Thursday to dismiss the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Christopher Cox, a former Republican congressman and a Bush appointee. Mr. McCain, who early in the week seemed to struggle to find a consistent message on the economy, also proposed a government body to relieve struggling financial institutions of some bad debt in hopes of keeping them solvent... Mr. McCain is expected to lay out a broader view of his approach to the crisis on Friday morning in Wisconsin. His Democratic rival for president, Mr. Obama, campaigning in New Mexico, issued the outlines of his own plan later Thursday. His campaign said he would fill in the details after he met Friday with his economic advisers in Miami, his next campaign stop. The actions of both men captured how they were being forced to make policy proposals and pronouncements on the fly, from one campaign rally to another, as each day’s developments in the financial markets and in Washington were overtaken by new ones the following day.

THE NEW MCCAIN: MORE AGGRESSIVE AND SCRIPTED ON THE TRAIL
Adam Nagourney, New York Times: Mr. McCain’s once easygoing if irreverent campaign presence — endearing to crowds, though often the kind of undisciplined excursions that landed him in the gaffe doghouse — has been put out to pasture. He takes far fewer chances, meaning there are fewer risqué jokes, zingers at a familiar face in the crowd, provocative observations on policy or politics, or exercises in self-derogatory humor. By every appearance, this Mr. McCain is, or at least is struggling to be, disciplined and on message in a way befitting of American politics today, if not quite befitting of the McCain of yesterday.

CAMPAIGN LIES, MEDIA DOUBLE STANDARDS
Stuart Taylor, Jr., National Journal: Some who have been admirers of John McCain think that the war hero has debased himself by using gross distortions to trash Barack Obama and his record. Others see the media fury over McCain's campaign ads as more evidence of a double standard driven by liberal bias at most major news organizations. Both are right. Although each candidate is responsible for many distortions--hardly a novelty--McCain has lately been leading the race to the bottom. At the same time, many in the media have been one-sided, sometimes adding to Obama's distortions rather than acting as impartial reporters of fact and referees of the mud fights. We still have many great journalists, but I no longer trust the major newspapers or television networks to provide consistently accurate and fair reporting and analysis of all the charges and countercharges... Indeed, one reason that candidates get away with dishonest campaign ads and speeches may be that it is so hard for undecided voters like me to discern which charges are true, which are exaggerated, and which are false. Most people can't spend hours every day cross-checking diverse sources of information to verify the accuracy of slanted stories and broadcasts.

Going down?

On Tuesday, I reported that Sarah Palin's favorability ratings, which peaked shortly after the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, were starting to slip. Between Sept. 13 and Sept. 17, the Alaska governor's unfavorables had climbed in the Diageo/Hotline poll from 30 percent to 37 percent; her favorables, meanwhile, had fallen from 52 percent to 47 percent. All in all, she'd gone from the most to least popular White House hopeful over the course of five short days.

The reason? "I suspect that we're starting to see Palin's considerable novelty wear off," I wrote. "Between now and Nov. 4, voters will stop seeing Palin as a fascinating story and starting taking her measure as an actual candidate for office. Some will approve; some won't... But it's hard to argue that the journey from intriguing new superstar to earthbound politician--a necessary part of the process--doesn't involve a loss of altitude. Just ask Barack Obama."

Still, I was careful to add that "we should hold off on drawing any hard and fast conclusions until more polling comes out." Well, now it has--and the stats confirm my initial hunch. According to the Research 2000 daily tracking poll--which is conducted for the liberal blog DailyKos by a nonpartisan firm that ranks as one of the most accurate in the field--Palin's favorability rating has been steadily declining since Sept. 11, when it topped out at 52 percent favorable / 35 percent unfavorable (+17). On Monday, Palin's positives and negatives flatlined; by this morning, more respondents disapproved (46 percent) than approved (42 percent) of the Republican vice-presidential nominee. Lest you discount a poll commissioned by a Democratic organization--and something tells me that many of you will--the latest survey from CBS News and the New York Times shows a similar decline. On Sept. 8, Palin boasted a 44-22 favorable-unfavorable rating. Today, her split is 40-30. That's the exact same net swing of -12 points found in the Diageo/Hotline poll.

Whether Palin's slippage affects McCain's bid remains to be seen. But to deny that she's slipping is no longer a reality-based proposition. 

All of a sudden, John McCain has a problem with Spain. In an interview Monday with Radio Caracol WSUA 1260AM, a Spanish-language station from Miami, the Republican presidential nominee was asked whether he would "be willing to invite President Jose Luis Zapatero to the White House." This should have been an easy question for McCain to answer--because he's answered it before.

Speaking to a reporter from the Spanish newspaper El Pais back in early April, McCain said, "this is the moment to leave behind discrepancies with Spain." (President Bush has yet to hold a formal bilateral meeting with the center-left Zapatero, who withdrew troops from Iraq shortly after taking office in 2004.) "I would like for [President Zapatero] to visit the United States," McCain added. "I am very interested not only in normalizing relations with Spain but in obtaining good and productive relations with the goal of addressing many issues and challenges that we have to confront together." Sounds sensible enough, right?

Except it's not what McCain said Monday. Instead, the Arizona senator responded to Radio Caracol's question with some boilerplate about being "willing to meet with those leaders who are friends and want to work with us in a cooperative fashion." Pressed to be more specific, McCain simply repeated his talking point: "I can assure you I will establish closer relations with our friends and I will stand up to those who want to do harm to the United States of America." Needless to say, that's an unusual way to refer to a European democracy and fellow member of NATO--as confused Spanish commenters have pointed out in the days since McCain's remarks broke overseas. Especially if you've already said that you "would like" its leader "to visit" the U.S.

How to account for the candidate's newly noncommittal position? As far as I can tell, Spain hasn't done anything since April to offend McCain--nothing, at least, that would move the European country off of his "must normalize relations" list and into some indeterminate gray area between "our friends" and "those who want to do us harm." That's why I can't help but think that what seems like a reversal was simply a misunderstanding.

Listening to the exchange again, it sounds as if McCain never quite knew who or what he was talking about. Maybe he misheard "Zapatero" as "Zapatista" or "Zapata." (The interviewer had a thick accent.) Maybe the name didn't ring a bell. Either way, McCain seemed to assume that after a long conversation about our enemies to the south--folks like Fidel Castro and Hugo Cesar* Chavez--he was being asked about yet another Latin American bad guy. That would explain why he cited Mexican President Felipe Calderon as an example of a "cooperative" friend; referred to his past work "with leaders in the hemisphere"; and said his decision to meet would be based on "the importance of our relationship Latin America and the entire region"--because he wasn't referring to Spain, or Europe, or Zapatero at all. In this interpretation, McCain was never quite clear on which country and leader Radio Caracol was asking him about and was simply sticking to platitudes to avoid making a mistake. 

That strikes me as an understandable error--at least initially. It's not unusual for a politician to bluff his response to a misheard question, and McCain was vague enough not to say anything diplomatically disastrous. Unlike the liberal blogosphere, I don't think this incident exposes him as a foreign-policy fraud (or senile old coot) who doesn't "doesn't know who the leader of Spain is."

For me, the problem is what McCain and Co. did after the apparent misunderstanding: they claimed that he had understood all along. According to top foreign-policy adviser Randy Scheunemann, "there is no doubt Senator McCain knew exactly to whom the question referred." The candidate's vagueness, says Scheunemann, simply reflected the fact that McCain does not want to "rule in or rule out a White House meeting with President Zapatero" and is reluctant "to spell out scheduling and meeting location specifics in advance." Given that McCain has already said he "would like for [President Zapatero] to visit the United States"--and didn't use the "scheduling or meeting location" excuse in the interview--Scheunemann's explanation strikes me as unsettling no matter how you slice it. Either he's telling the truth and McCain was deliberately (rather than mistakenly) comparing the Spanish prime minister to the anti-American leaders of Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba by saying he'd be "willing to meet with any leader who is dedicated to the same principles and philosophy that we are for human rights, democracy and freedom," and then pointedly refusing to include Zapatero (a democratic leader) in that category. (I won't "rule in or rule out" whether Spain is the enemy.) Or Scheunemann is covering up McCain's confusion with spin, which means the campaign is willing to complicate its candidate's foreign-policy positions--and his potential relationship with a major European ally--to avoid exposing him to (comparatively minor) charges of ignorance. Or hearing loss. Or whatever.

Option One--McCain's stance on Spain has become needlessly derogatory for no particular reason--suggests that he's erratic. Option Two--McCain is willing to adopt a needlessly derogatory stance simply to protect against the perception of a gaffe--suggests that he puts politics before policy. Either one strikes me as a far more disturbing error than mishearing--or not recognizing--the name Jose Luis Zapatero.

And that is a problem.

*D'oh. Stupid mix-up. Good thing I'm not running for president.

(AP Photo / Gerald Herbert)

From the pool report by Perry Bacon, Jr., of the Washington Post on Joe Biden's visit this morning to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio:

[Biden] then approached the print pooler and said, “you look liked you played some, man.”

As the print pooler was saying ‘no I didn’t,” the candidate moved closer, tapped his upper chest and said “you need to work on your pecs.”

Stumper hereby nominates Joe Biden as America's first Frat Boy in Chief. What's next? Beer pong in the Lincoln Bedroom? Free Abercrombie and Fitch cargo shorts for visiting heads of state? A Chris Farley National Monument?

We can only imagine what Biden would've said about Stumper's feeble T. Rex arms...

It's no secret that Barack Obama is confident. After all, he occasionally refers to himself in the third person. "Every place is Barack Obama country once Barack Obama's been there," he once said. He often tells voters that he is "imperfect," which presupposes that they need reminding. And then there's the little fact that he decided to run for leader of the free world after serving less than two years in the U.S. Senate.

But still: a skilled retail politician on the cusp of the presidency should at least try to fake some humility.

Last night on CBS' Evening News, anchor Katie Couric asked Obama "what one personal flaw do you think might hinder your ability to be president?" Obama's answer: "I don't think there's a flaw that would hinder my ability to function as president." Sensing that the average viewer would react with mild incredulity to his claim of presidential perfection, Obama continued: "I think that all of us have things we need to improve. You know, I said during the primary that my management of paper can sometimes be a problem."

Apologies to all the Obamans out there, but "my management of paper"? That's weak. It's not just that Obama's phrasing makes his supposed "flaw" sound comically insignificant, as if he's been known to jam too many pages into a three-hole punch on occassion. It's that he really meant it as a strength. Pushed by a laughing Couric to "come up with something better than that," Obama did, well, the exact opposite. "What is often a strength can be a weakness," he said, pivoting to self-promotion. "I think, as president, with all the information that's coming at you constantly, you're never gonna have 100 percent information. And you've just gotta make the call quickly and surely. And I think that's a capacity that I've shown myself to have." Translation: I'm a bold, decisive, visionary leader, not a paper-pushing bureaucrat. It's like the aggressive job applicant who answers the predictable "what's your greatest flaw" question by saying she's "a perfectionist." 

Most sane people will probably say that I'm making a mountain out of a molehill--and they'd be right. But Obama's response still kind of bugs me. Showing that you're aware of and comfortable with your own shortcomings is a sign of strength, at least in my book--and it's something that Obama has been remarkably willing to do in the past. I'm reminded especially of the time in the summer of 2006 when the Illinois senator told Slate's Jacob Weisberg that "there's a piece of [Lyndon B. Johnson] in me. That kind of hunger—desperate to win, please, succeed, dominate—I don't know any politician who doesn't have some of that reptilian side to him." Obama's response was one of the most honest self-assessments I've ever heard from a public figure, and it was revealing (and appealing) not because of what it said, which was self-evident, but because Obama was willing to say it.

Of course, if Obama had characterized himself a cold-blooded striver now--under the harsh kleig lights of a presidential race in its final stages--the press would've plastered it across every front page in the country. The McCain campaign would've had a field day. That's obviously why Obama took the risk-free route and refused to expose any flaw. That said, his caution was a little excessive. No one was actually expecting Obama to incriminate himself--to say, for example, that "my obsession with secrecy will make it impossible for me to preside over an open and accountable government." The only requirement was to reveal something, anything, however small. He could've joked that his addiction to SportsCenter might make it hard to focus on leading the free world between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m. each day. Or he could've gone the McCain route--also a bit of a deflection--and spoken of the tendencies he needs to "guard against" once in the White House, like "get[ting] in [a] bubbl[e]" and not receiving "all the information [he] need[s] to make the best judgments." "I've got to make sure that I reach out to Democrats, to Republicans, to people who have opposing views," McCain said. Obama could've even punctured the perception that he's overconfident by admitting to occasional flashes of overconfidence. Nothing says "humble" like a guy who acknowledges he's not always humble.

Then again, maybe that's too much to ask. After all, no one's perfect.

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

CAMPAIGN TRAIL REPORTERS SIDELINED
(Mike Allen, Politico)
The flocks of campaign reporters who fly around the country with the presidential candidates have been more sidelined in the 2008 campaign than any in generations, sealed off from any meaningful access to either Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) or Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). On Air Obama, reporters gawk at him moving around up front, talking with aides or on a cell phone, but can only guess what he is saying or thinking. On Straight Talk Air, the flying McCain campaign, aides draw the curtains so that not even glimpses are possible. Not only do the reporters have little interaction with the candidates, but increasingly they are having little impact on the broad campaign narratives and daily story lines that supply most voters with their impressions of the candidates. That's more often taking place in cable studios or on Web sites far removed from the ceaseless grind of the press bubble — in which reporters schlump on and off the plane, in and out of buses and gymnasiums-turned-filing centers, several times a day, dozens of times a week. A combination of technology and iron message discipline by heavily centralized campaigns has consigned these reporters – once the storied “boys on the bus” – largely to feeding off the public material available to almost anyone over the Web, with very little interaction with the next president of the United States. 

MCCAIN'S CLOSING ARGUMENT
(George Will, Washington Post)
Palin is as bracing as an Arctic breeze and delightfully elicits the condescension of liberals whose enthusiasm for everyday middle-class Americans cannot survive an encounter with one. But the country's romance with her will, as romances do, cool somewhat, and even before November some new fad might distract a nation that loves "American Idol" for the metronomic regularity with which it discovers genius in persons hitherto unsuspected of it. McCain should, therefore, enunciate a closing argument for his candidacy that goes to fundamentals of governance, concerning which the vice presidency is usually peripheral. His argument should assert the virtues of something that voters, judging by their behavior over time, prefer -- divided government.

WHAT, ME WORRY?
(John Dickerson, Slate)
When this election is over, the Obama campaign's cool demeanor will either be seen as its signature genius ("They kept their heads about them") or its signature flaw ("They failed to respond to their opponent's strategy"). We'll know in 48 days.maybe they're not rattled because they've been through this before. If they'd listened to the polls and Democratic experts, they'd never have gotten in the race. In the summer of 2007, there were lots of Obama supporters who thought he should panic a little more—or risk losing to Hillary Clinton. The Obama campaign stuck to its plan and won. Aides often cite this lesson in explaining why they're not going to overreact now. Obama can also stay calm because he got a break this week. The public focus is now on the economy, an issue where Obama has advantages. It's also harder for McCain to manufacture distractions—it would look out of touch. Plus, the Palin novelty has started to wear off. Obama is back in the lead in some polls. All of this means he doesn't have to do anything flamboyantly out of character to get attention.

FUNDAMENTALLY, MCCAIN HAS SOMETHING TO WORRY ABOUT
(Dan Balz, Washington Post)
McCain has managed to make the best of this terrible environment. His pick of Sarah Palin proved enormously effective in the short term. His party appears newly energized, even enthusiastic about its ticket, even if they still distrust the man at the top of it. He has reinvented himself for the final stretch of the campaign -- or perhaps found a voice that had been missing throughout this election cycle. As in the primaries, he has been reduced to basics, and they have served him well over the past two months. His best hope of winning is to make the campaign a test of character. How long can he sustain all this? Absent external events, he was doing well. With the economic news of this week, the polls hint at a deflation in his position. The playing field has once again tilted slightly toward Obama, who now must take advantage of it. This remains as competitive a race as many had forecast. National polls are tight. Battleground states are tight. But the underlying structure that has governed this campaign from the start has not improved. That is the real fundamentals problem for John McCain.

CAMPAIGNS STRUGGLE TO CRAFT BAILOUT RESPONSE
(Alexander Burns, Politico)
Even as they sought to blame their opponents’ policies for the downturn, the presidential and vice presidential candidates made clear that they were groping for a coherent response to the federal government’s stunning role in the bailout of the insurance behemoth. “The fact that we have reached a point where the Federal Reserve felt it had to take this unprecedented step with the American Insurance Group [sic] is the final verdict on the failed economic philosophy of the last eight years,” Sen. Barack Obama said in a statement that neither endorsed nor condemned the AIG deal. If Obama’s response sounded hesitant, his running mate, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., wasn’t any clearer. During a speech in Maumee, Ohio, Wednesday morning, Biden never mentioned the AIG plan directly but issued a message to Wall Street executives: “Let me tell you something, if we’re going to bail you out, if we give you an opportunity, if we give corporations the inside track then you better damn well open your books to us." It was an impassioned, crowd-pleasing argument for corporate transparency – and it neglected to acknowledge that just one day earlier, Biden had rejected the idea of an AIG bailout, telling the Today Show: “No, I don’t think they should be bailed out by the federal government.” Both Republicans, John McCain and running mate Sarah Palin, also dodged on the AIG bailout.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

As regular Stumper readers probably know by now, I'm totally addicted to "Bidenisms." By that I don't mean the stupid stuff that seems to slip from the Delaware senator's mouth as at semiregular intervals--like when he said that Barack Obama was "clean and articulate" last February. I'm talking about a different (and more frequent) verbal tic: the need to preface everything he says with a word or phrase meant to emphasize his own honesty. To date, I've collected about a dozen of these "I'm Being Candid" catchphrases. They include "literally" (often repeated several times in a row); "this is factual"; "I'm not making this up"; "I mean this sincerely"; "I'm serious"; "I'm not joking"; "this is not hyperbole"; "this is the God's honest truth" and "I mean it." The only thing that matters more to Biden than speaking his mind, it seems, is letting you know that he's speaking his mind.

Apparently, the tic is contagious. As the Politico's Jonathan Martin points out, Biden's boss sounded suspiciously Bidenesque while dinging John McCain this afternoon in Elko, Nev. "Yesterday, John McCain actually said that if he's president he'll take on--and I quote--'the old boys network in Washington,'" Obama said. "I'm not making this up. This is somebody who's been in Congress for 26 years, who put seven of the most powerful Washington lobbyists in charge of his campaign. And now he tells us that he’s the one who will take on the ol’ boy network.  The ol’ boy network?  In the McCain campaign, that’s called a staff meeting."

Hoo-hah! Hearing the echo, I have to wonder: Has Biden been consulting on the feistier parts of Obama's recent speeches? For weeks now, the Democratic No. 2 has regularly zipped off anti-McCain zingers far zestier than anything his No. 1 has been able to muster. Today, for example, he found a particularly memorable way to call McCain a latecomer to financial regulation: “If John cares so much about this now, where was he a week ago? Where was he a month ago? Where was he five years ago? All of a sudden it’s ‘My goodness, there’s greed on Wall Street!’” But now that Obama has taken a more aggressive tack, lots of Bidenesque mockery seems to be showing up in his speeches. "By the end of the week John McCain will be telling us how he and Phil Gramm and the seven lobbyists are planning to storm the Treasury Department with torches and pitchforks," he added today in Elko. "Come on."

Perhaps the problem is that even though Biden has been saying stuff like this for weeks, no one seems to be paying attention--so Chicago just decided to call it up from the minors. Which should come as something of a relief for ol' Joe, given the recent report in the Washington Post that "the buzz around Palin has left Biden largely obscured and generating so little attention that some Democrats are questioning whether he was the right pick."  At least if this veep thing doesn't work out he can still get a job as a speechwriter. 

We mean it. Literally.

 

It was a moment of earth-shattering import--a brief, blinding instant when everything we ever thought we knew about the nature of the universe was suddenly thrown out the proverbial window. This morning as Alaska Governor and Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin ducked into Karl's Restaurant and Deli in Cleveland, Ohio to greet a group of patrons, the press pool that's followed her every move for the past three weeks requested a reaction to the AIG bailout. And Palin--gasp!--actually responded. “Disappointed that taxpayers are called upon to bailout another one,” she said.

Hallelujah.

It has been 25 days since John McCain picked Palin as his running mate. This is the first time she's answered an impromptu question from a national reporter on the trail. For those of you who aren't keeping track--not covering politics for a living, are you?--it's been 34 days since McCain himself held a press conference (Birmingham, Mich., Aug. 13). His town-hall meeting Monday in Florida was the first time he's fielded questions from voters in nearly a month (New Mexico, Aug. 20). And Palin never interacted with reporters OR voters until today. (The DNC has even launched a "McCain Press Watch" clock to keep track of the blackout.)

This bunker mentality isn't totally unprecedented. Democratic rival Barack Obama, always a distant presence, shut out journos for long stretches of his primary battle with Hillary Clinton. But McCain's silent treatment has been a particularly striking shift in strategy from a candidate who long prided himself on interacting freely with the press after each event and on board bus; who calls town hall meetings "the most important part, in my view, of the process"; who argued as recently as January that avoiding inquiries from reporters "destroys credibility"; and who has promised weekly news conferences and a British-style question period if he's elected president. "I enjoy it a lot," he said earlier this year of the give-and-take. "It keeps me intellectually stimulated, it keeps me thinking about issues." The blackout got so bad that a dozen reporters on board Straight Talk Air staged a mini insurrection Monday after leaving Tampa. "Bring Mac back! Bring Mac back!" they chanted. Staffers in the business cabin smiled--and promptly closed the curtain.

But now Team McCain may be pulling it back again--at least a little. This afternoon, Palin sat down with FOX News' Sean Hannity--alas, not the toughest interrogator--for her second television interview; she'll face Katie Couric next week as well. Meanwhile, Palin and McCain will meet up tonight in Grand Rapids, Mich. for their first joint town hall event, at which they're expected to field questions from the crowd. (Palin, who has had no face-to-face interaction with voters aside from shaking hands at rope lines, was supposed to do a Q&A for the first time this afternoon in Cleveland. It's unclear whether she did.) Still, McCain and Palin are still far from meeting Obama and Biden's current standard of accessibility. (Biden has done more than 80 interviews with local and national media since the Democrats held their national convention late last month.) The rest of the Republicans' appearances this week--in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Green Bay, Wisc.; and Blaine, Minn.--were supposed to be town halls as well. Now they're rallies. And neither candidate is planning to tango with national reporters anytime soon.

It's a delicate dance that Team McCain is engaged in. As my NEWSWEEK colleague Jonathan Alter noted earlier this month, the McCain campaign may be providing Palin for a few low-impact initial chats with folks like Sean Hannity so that "when the media complain that she is being kept away"--i.e., no press conferences--"the McCain campaign will cite the half dozen or so interviews she has granted as proof that the campaign press is just bellyaching." Shielding Palin (and McCain, for that matter) from the spotlight is a low-risk strategy. It not only reduces the risks of gaffes and maintains near-total control over the message, it's also makes the media-bashing masses squeal with vindictive delight. Still, it's worth noting that the political press corps--as despised as it might be, often fairly--is actually important here. Thanks to Palin's relatively skimpy C.V., the greatest test of her readiness for office--as it was for the equally green Obama--will be how well she performs in the campaign pressure-cooker. There's no better measure of her character and convictions than dueling with press and the public on a regular basis. Palin's rise has been remarkable. But until she answers some tough, fair questions, we won't know whether it's prepared her for high office.

I mean, we're talking about the White House. President of the United States of America. Leader of the Free World. Here's hoping that McCain and Co. continue to pull back that curtain.

My Newsweek colleague Daniel Gross asks whether there's any excuse for McCain's gaffe about the economy.

John McCain set off a firestorm yesterday when he said, "The fundamentals of our economy are strong," while also noting that these are tough times. McCain, for whom the economy is not comfortable terrain, was simply repeating a formulation he's used before. In August, he told radio host Laura Ingraham: "I still believe the fundamentals of our economy are strong. We've got terribly big challenges now, whether it be housing or employment or so many of the other — health care. It's very, very tough times."

Commenting on the seaworthiness of the nation's economic ship even as it is being swamped by gale-driven waves is a staple of the modern presidency. When there's upheaval in the markets, or a discouraging run of economic news, the president or the treasury secretary trudges out to tell us to remain calm...

It's easy to see why leaders resort to such banal, swaddling language in times of stress. It's a way of changing the conversation, redirecting attention away from the debacle du jour and tapping into Americans' basic pride and faith in their system. Yes, some of the numbers are less than optimal. But this too shall pass. A few windows may have been blown out, but the foundation of the building is just fine. One rarely hears protestations of soundness when the economy is doing well – the numbers and the markets speak for themselves.

The question remains: Are the fundamentals sound? Was McCain right, or hopelessly rosy-eyed? It depends on which fundamentals you want to emphasize. There are times when all the fundamentals are unsound, as was the case in 1931. And there are times when all the fundamentals appear to be sound, as was the case in the mid- to late 1990s. The rest of the time, the fundamentals reside somewhere between the two poles (the left pole signifying we're totally screwed and the right pole signifying that happy days are here again).  Today, we're closer to being totally screwed.

Consider. The U.S. needs to create about 150,000 jobs per month just to keep pace with growing population. When payroll jobs fall for eight straight months and the unemployment rate spikes, and when new weekly unemployment claims remain above 400,000, the economy may not be fundamentally sound.

When inflation in the past 12 months has run at 5.4 percent, well over the twice the level with which central bankers are comfortable, the economy may not be fundamentally sound.

When foreclosures are running at record rates and housing prices fall by nearly 16 percent year over year, the economy may not be fundamentally sound.

When the two largest financial institutions in the nation, which guarantee about half of the mortgages, fail and have to be taken over by the government, when the fourth-largest investment bank files for Chapter 11, and when the Federal Reserve effectively nationalizes a massive insurance firm that is a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the economy may not be fundamentally sound.

In an economy where consumption constitutes 70 percent of activity, retail sales falling two months in a row may indicate that the economy may not be fundamentally sound.

When industrial production decreases, the economy may not be fundamentally sound.

When the nation's three major automakers, some of the largest remaining manufacturing entities, report sales declines of over 20 percent and beg the taxpayers for loans, the economy may not be fundamentally sound.

The litany of bad news has to be weighed against good news, of course.

When gross domestic product grows at a 3.3 percent annual rate despite weathering a series of shocks, the economy may be fundamentally sound.

When inflation shows signs of moderating and the prices of important commodities return to more reasonable levels, the economy may be fundamentally sound.

When exports rise 20 percent from year-ago levels, the economy may be fundamentally sound.

When $3.5 trillion is parked in money market mutual funds and corporations have vast piles of cash sitting on their balance sheets, it's an indication that money remains available for investment and consumption, and that the economy may be fundamentally sound.

On the whole, however, a reasonable observer would have to conclude that, on balance, the fundamentals of the U.S. economy are less than sound. And even John McCain has recognized his mistake. After a day of withering criticism, he abandoned his previous position. Now he's calling the situation "a total crisis."

READ THE REST HERE.

This morning, John McCain released an ad called "Foundation" about the current financial crisis. Staring straight into the camera, the Arizona senator pledges to "reform Wall Street and fix Washington." "I've taken on tougher guys than this before," he says, evoking his senatorial scraps and Vietnam service. In contrast, his "opponent"--that would be Barack Obama--offers "talk and taxes" as his "only solutions."

As political messaging goes, "Foundation" is pretty effective. "For my money, this is McCain at his best and the sort of spot that people will respond to," writes Politico's Jonathan Martin. The only problem: the ad assumes that no one's been listening to anything the candidates have actually said since Monday's market meltdown. That's because only one White House hopeful has spent the last few days trying to provide the public with something more material than "talk" to hang on to. And his name isn't John McCain.

One of the most persistent criticisms of this year's Democratic nominee is that he avoids "specifics," preferring instead to prattle on about airy concepts like "hope" and "change" and "unity." This is partly true--Obama does talk about hope and change. But mostly it's false. The problem has never been that Obama is allergic to specifics. He's not. This year's Democratic primary contest was not only the most extensive and intensive in U.S. history--it was also by far the heaviest on policy, with both Obama and Hillary Clinton unveiling dozens of minutely detailed plans on everything from health care to energy over its interminable eighteen month span. It's just that people who weren't paying close attention--and that was most of us--heard Obama chattering about change far more often, and more loudly, than we heard him prescribing policy. Casual voters allot only a tiny corner of their brains to each presidential candidate. Obama filled that space with rhetoric. So he was stereotyped--and, in part, he stereotyped himself--as the guy who was more interested in speeches than solutions (even if his website was chock full of them).  

Which is one of the reasons why I wrote on Monday that the "disastrous news" from Wall Street represents a "huge [political] opportunity for Obama"--an opportunity, that is, to steer the spotlight to his economic plans and policies, which have been largely eclipsed, until now, by his emphasis on oratory. And despite McCain's "all talk" accusation, that's exactly what Obama has done. Now, nothing Obama has said since Monday has been "new," per se. But that's because he's already addressed these problems. On March 27, 2008 Obama unveiled a six-point plan for revamping our financial market regulatory framework; in February 2006 he introduced legislation to combat deteriorating mortgage lending practices. So when he took to the stage at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden Grand Junction, Colo. Tuesday morning to say how he proposes "to restore confidence in our markets and turn our economy around,", he had plenty of specifics to draw on. Take his plan to provide 10 million middle-class homeowners 10 percent off their interest rate through a universal mortgage tax credit, for example. Or the one about giving the Federal Reserve supervisory authority over any financial institution it extends credit to. Or the one about ending our balkanized framework of overlapping and competing regulatory agencies.

The list goes on. The point is, Obama went to great lengths in his speech to get as specific as possible. Since then Chicago has released an in-depth fact sheet outlining Obama's plan and an ad, "Plan for Change" [above], that consists of nothing but the candidate staring straight ahead and soberly explaining his major policy positions. For Obama, this shift to specifics is simply good politics--a way to show a worried country that he's prepared to lead. You can disagree with Obama's proposals--many folks will, whether out of partisanship or principle. But to say, like McCain, that he's offering nothing but "talk" is simply false.

In fact, it's been McCain's response--not Obama's--that's felt a little light on substance so far. Unlike Obama, McCain has never made a priority of calling for increased regulation on investment firms and insurance agencies like AIG. In fact, "he has never departed in any major way from his party's embrace of deregulation and relying more on market forces than on the government to exert discipline," as the New York Times reported on Tuesday. A decade ago, McCain embraced legislation designed "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." Sponsored by top McCain economic advisor Phil Gramm--then a Texas senator--that bill ultimately "helped pave the way for companies such as AIG and Lehman Brothers to become behemoths laden with bad loans and investments," according to the Washington Post. McCain's ideological commitment to deregulation has resurfaced multiple times during the 2008 campaign. Shortly before Bear Stearns collapsed last March, for example, the candidate characterized himself as "fundamentally a deregulator" who's "always for less regulation," and even as AIG faced collapse yesterday, he told Matt Lauer that "we cannot have the taxpayers bail out AIG or anybody else." (He's reversed his position now that the government was forced to commit $85 billion to stop AIG's collapse.)

My point here is not to play a tiresome political game of gotcha. McCain's long-held belief in deregulation is sincere and consistent with his fiscal conservatism. But the current credit crunch has forced him--as both a matter of political survival and rational policymaking--to change his tune. In the past few days, McCain, like Obama, has come out in support of "boosting the regulation of banks, investment banks and other financial institutions" and "tightening the rules on the type and amount of funds financial institutions should hold," as the Wall Street Journal put it. On the stump, he's presented himself as a pugilistic populist and champion of regulation who's determined to "take care of the workers" and remedy the "casual oversight by regulatory agencies in Washington" at the root of the current crisis.

The problem is that because this is such a new posture for McCain, he's yet to back it up with much in the way of specifics. Delivered Tuesday in Tampa, his speech on "reforming our financial markets" devoted only three of its nine paragraphs to actual reforms--and even then, McCain spoke in the broadest possible terms. There will be "comprehensive regulations that will apply the rules and enforce them to the full"; "Wall Street operator[s]" who "abus[e] the trust of the public" will "face the consequences." The closest McCain came to a specific proposal was his promise "reduce the debt and risk that any bank can take on" and "prevent the kind of wild speculation that can put our markets at risk"--laudable goals, but little more than platitudes without actual plans to put in place. Meanwhile, unlike Obama, McCain has not posted any additional information on his website; the senator's economic plan doesn't even mention market reform. "I don't think it's, at this moment, imperative to write down exactly what the plan has to be," Douglas Holtz Eakin, McCain's top economic adviser, said yesterday. "[It's just] some standards we just have to aim for and we just haven't met." In other words, McCain doesn't need any actual policy prescriptions. Framing himself as a vigorous, trustbusting man of action--Theodore S. McCain, perhaps--should be enough.

For the record, there's nothing wrong with McCain's vagueness--in a vacuum. After struggling against his anti-regulatory instincts, he's currently sounding all the right notes on market reform. And it's great that the candidates are finally debating important economic questions, like whether taxes should be raised or lowered on folks making over $250,000 a year. That said, calling Obama's approach "all talk" is simply hypocritical. Right now, it's McCain who's relying on pleasant words to get by--and Obama who's emphasizing his wonky side. Whether anyone is listening closely enough to tell the difference is another story.

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

CANDIDATES PROMISE BROAD CHANGES FOR WALL STREET
(Nick Timiraos, Elizabeth Holmes and Michael M. Phillips, Wall Street Journal)
The candidates, Republican Sen. John McCain and Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, differ on their plans and their regulatory philosophies, but both are talking about shaking up Wall Street. Amid the credit crunch's most wrenching phase, both support boosting the regulation of banks, investment banks and other financial institutions. Both say regulators should tighten rules on the type and amount of funds financial institutions should hold. Both say the government must consolidate the patchwork of financial regulators into a more streamlined system... Sen. McCain took a far more aggressive tone Tuesday, in the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and the forced sale of Merrill Lynch & Co... The sentiment is a far cry from Sen. McCain's antiregulation record. On the stump, he didn't explain how he would distinguish legitimate investment from "wild speculation" or exactly what steps he would take to eliminate the latter... The Obama campaign -- which has made financial reform part of its policy prescriptions -- sees the latest turmoil as a chance to seize the momentum lost after Sen. McCain selected Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as a running mate. Sen. Obama accused Sen. McCain of being a "Johnny-come-lately" in the financial crisis.

MCCAIN EMBRACES REGULATION AFTER MANY YEARS OF OPPOSITION
(Michael D. Shear, Washington Post)
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.

MCCAIN HAS TWO FACES: WASHINGTON IN- AND OUTSIDER
(Glenn Johnson, Associated Press)
McCain has long considered himself a political maverick, and there's no doubt that the Arizona senator has bucked the system — especially later in his career. A guy who was so close to the establishment that he once had his own number in the Keating Five scandal over time has challenged the institutions of Congress with campaign finance legislation and other reform measures. A character so prominent in his party he could credibly run for its 2000 presidential nomination was enough of a bipartisan figure that Democrat John Kerry considered McCain as a running mate during the 2004 election. This time around, though, McCain is projecting a dual image: the outside insider. A 25-year veteran of the House and Senate, a white man like all the rest of the country's presidents to date, McCain is trying to fend off a 44-year-old, first-term senator angling to become the first black to reach the Oval Office. It's prompted almost melodic speechmaking and statements.

ARE WE DUE FOR ANOTHER MOMENTUM SHIFT?
(Charlie Cook, National Journal)
There seems to be a tonal shift in the national conversation over the last few days compared to early last week. Regarding Palin, there has been a shift from surprise and novelty to a much closer and more critical scrutiny than she received during the pre-pick vetting. A legitimate question is whether portrayals of Palin as a petty and vindictive elective official who fattens up the public payroll with old schoolmates and makes questionable policy decisions is permeating the public consciousness... It's also true that McCain, who historically has been treated by the press better than most Republican presidential contenders, is now incurring the full wrath of a press corps that has decided that he has crossed the line, with ads and statements that do even greater violence to truth and fairness than is the norm. It is a tone that some say has left McCain abandoning the "straight talk" ideals that made him such an attractive candidate in 2000. No matter if what McCain and his campaign is saying and communicating is the truth or not, and whether or not he is abandoning his straight talk ideals. This will make it very difficult for them to get a message across, and the media refs are not likely to give him the benefit of the doubt on close calls.

MCCAIN CAMPAIGN NOT 'SLEAZIEST'
(David Mark and Avi Zenilman, Politico)
David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s chief strategist, said Sunday that John McCain is running the “sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern presidential campaign history.” It was a line trotted out all weekend by various Obama staffers as part of an effort to portray the Republican nominee as a purveyor of the slimiest tactics in recent memory. Yet presidential historians and political scientists interviewed by Politico scoffed at the notion, suggesting McCain’s approach is no harsher than those used in previous modern campaigns and certainly not by comparison to many historic campaigns.  “The idea that this campaign is the sleaziest ever is absurd,” said David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers who has written books on Presidents Coolidge and Nixon. "In fact, there's been very little that's below the belt, and aides have been fired on all sides when they've gotten near, let alone crossed, the lines."

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

By Richard Wolffe

Call it the Palin effect in reverse. John McCain’s veep pick isn’t just firing up the GOP base with bigger crowds and more cash. Sarah Palin is having the same impact on the progressive base of the Democratic Party.

Take a look at what’s happened to MoveOn.org, the signature online left-of-center group that marks its 10th anniversary this year. The group has added almost a million new members since 2007, many of them over the summer, to bring its total to 4.2 million – around the same size as the NRA on the right. Along with the new members, there has been a surge in donations allowing the group to double its advertising bud