Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? A Former First Lady & A Guy Named Tim

With his announcement of the national security team yesterday, President-elect Barack Obama materially completed his cabinet and White House staff. There are of course more appointments to be made, and some of those are promised to be Republicans, but the major positions of the new Administration are now mostly known. You’ve seen it written in many other places already, but it bears repeating that this is a demonstrably pragmatic-looking Administration, at least in terms of its top personnel, though the “centrist” label is far better-deserved for the cabinet secretaries (whose independent power has gotten out of whack under Bush-II anyway), than for the actual White House staff, from whom the policy initiatives are supposed to flow. A run-down of exactly what we know and what we may expect is in order at this point:

By far the biggest appointments announced so far are on the domestic policy side Timothy Geithner for Secretary of the Treasury, and, on the foreign policy side, Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State. The Clinton appointment has of course roadblocked the recent coverage of the transition–dripping as it is with Shakespearean pathos and the veiled prospects of poor message discipline, in-fighting, leaks, and even the chance of fresh new scandals.

With this selection, Mr. Obama demonstrates once again that he is willing to take calculated risks on the political side of the ledger if the end result is to channel the productive energy of a one-time rival in his favor. And if you hesitate to agree that this can be a very, very favorable strategy indeed, just go back and look at some of the things that were being written in late July about Joe Biden. Indeed the best part of the decision, from Obama’s standpoint, is that whatever drama emerges from this move will redound to Clinton’s detriment rather than his own. Obama’s credential as a disciplined manager who evokes strong loyalty and all but leak-proof message control is permanently punched–while the reputation brought to the situation on the same scores by the Clintons is…well…not quite as distinguished. If Mr. Obama finds himself in the worst-case scenario of having to fire Mrs. Clinton, few will remember back to these past days and weeks as an invitation to question his judgment in picking for the job.

But if the Clinton appointment is the one garnering all the news, the Geithner appointment is surely the one that tells us considerably more about just what sort of Administration the new team promises to be. Geithner is neither a liberal firebrand nor a Chicago-style political crony (the two things we were promised by the radical right to expect from Obama’s inner circle). What he is, instead, is a uniquely qualified individual with a full resume aimed specifically at the job. As President of the New York branch of the United States Federal Reserve, Mr. Geithner’s current position straddles the fence between the regulatory function of the Fed (all district banks regulate the banking activity in their districts) and the monetary policy side (since the New York bank, in particular, enjoys permanent standing on the Federal Open Market Committee, where the money supply is raised or lowered by simple majority vote).

The most visible of the Treasury Secretary’s jobs in the next Administration will be to account for the bailout money that has been shoveled willy-nilly at the financial sector over the past few weeks and to more prudently spend whatever of that money is left (which won’t be much). But the ongoing job of the Treasury Secretary–to raise the necessary bond revenue from deficit spending–is likely to become a significant challenge in the next four years, as both the Social Security Trust and the government of the Peoples’ Republic of China find it increasingly difficult to purchase new bonds at the daily Treasury auction. Once this simmering crisis erupts onto the scene, perhaps within the first two years of the incoming government, Geithner’s track-record as a cool head on the FOMC, and his proven credential as a provocative, outside-the-box thinker will serve us all, regardless of party affiliation. It promises to be a very difficult assignment, and essentially no one is as qualified to fulfill it right now.

There is at all events a desperate need for a fresh look at the question of regulatory oversight of the financial markets, and on this front as well, Mr. Geithner scores high marks for taking just the sort of pragmatic, centrist approach to such questions that the Obama appointments are receiving so much attention for in general. Clearly, the Bush/Paulson approach has left the nation’s financial system in tatters–but it’s not obvious to even some of the most liberal thinkers on the subject that a return to the days of Glass-Steagall wouldn’t exacerbate the problem by serving as a disincentive to capital. It’s a poignant thought to consider for the pro-regulation crowd that many of the best-performing securities during the current bear market would have been illegal before Glass-Steagall was repealed. However one looks at it, the Geithner nomination is a laudable, perhaps even brilliant decision. Call it two for two, if you must, though there have certainly been others outside the scope of this particular column.

Oh, and there’s one last major element of aplomb to Mr. Obama’s galaxy of selections made thusfar: Geithner, who might otherwise have had one of the most visible (and probably controversial) tenures in the history of the Treasury, doesn’t like publicity. He’s a wonk, just as all the district bank presidents in the Federal Reserve system are wonks. So how does a President who wants the most effective performance from such a key player do his part to help ensure that’s exactly what he gets? How about by nominating an ambitious, headline-hungry formal rival for Secretary of State?

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? Whither Reaganomics?

Author’s note: Today’s is the first post in the Blue Economist column on the subject of “Blue-State Economics: Viewing Our Most Important Policy Debate Through Progressive Eyes”

On one level, there’s little shock value to be derived from the near total absence of Republican mischief making in the current, lame-duck session of Congress: They did, after all, just get their watches wound in the national election. However, taking a slightly longer view, it’s not clear that this same measure of electoral defeat has stopped them before. Past democratic transitions have been marred by a bull-headed intransigence on the part of the defeated. This has been born of equal parts denial, ideological certitude, and base whipping. Just ask Bill Clinton.

If all is quiet on the right flank in Washington these days, it may just be that the Republican agenda makers, especially on the domestic side of the ledger, have awakened to the bankruptcy of their ideas. However, it is a far more likely scenario is that the right is lying in wait for the sort of substantive policy shifts that Barack Obama has already promised and was assailed for during the campaign. Once this assault has whipped their own base into a frenzy of disdain, Republicans can renew their time-tested formula of overwhelming the national agenda with catch phrases and vitriol. This will inevitably cast the Democrats in a weak light, despite their power.

It is worth considering how things got this way.

The modern discipline of economics is surprisingly neutral on questions of political discourse: Progressive income taxes may be defended on the principal of “diminishing marginal utility,” by which a dollar taken from a wealthy person and given to a poor person has a net-beneficial effect on all of society’s collective happiness, to pick one random but unusually topical example. Another example is where environmental regulations may be defended on the principal of “internalizing social costs,” wherein the non-monetary repercussions of a firm’s activities are converted into monetary ones through fines and regulations. In addition, minimum wage laws may be defended as having negligible effects on the employment of unskilled labor, since the unskilled labor in question is already being used in its smallest possible quantities by the firms employing them.

However, as adaptable as such progressive claims would seem to be to the underlying principles of modern economic thought, the academy is at the same time populated by individuals so ubiquitously and inflexibly conservative as to render them the frequent butt of both merriment and derision at the hands of their would-be colleagues in the other social sciences. “An economist engages someone else’s ideas about the way the world works,” wrote one columnist in a recent edition of The New Yorker, “the way a bulldozer engages a picket fence.”

This phenomenon is largely attributable to the coincidental (and misguided) desire on the part of professional economists to be regarded as objective, physical or “hard” scientists–more like chemists and biologists–and less like their messy-headed brethren down the hall in Psychology and Poly-Sci. If the practitioner has to be clean, then the practice has to be clean too. This in turn means that the rich (progressive) texture of policy debates must melt on contact with the paradigm to prevent it from looking unresolved. The anguish of jobs lost to technological change, the qualitative detriment of polluted air, the elusive tabulation of the spoils of a war on poverty–all of these are matters dismissed with a smug wink and the back of a hand.

As the paradigm has polarized itself to the right, so too has the rhetoric from conservative think tanks been tailored to a world where the cleanliness and simplicity of an answer is its highest virtue. This exists in a perfect synergy with the rank-and-file’s inability to regard any complex idea as anything but a threat. Surely the good people at Americans for Tax Reform don’t really intend for their government to be “drowned in the bathtub”–surely Grover Norquist has been to enough school to know that bridges in the host city of the Republican National Convention will, absent a government that’s just been drowned in someone’s bathtub, fall unceremoniously down. However, with a simple paradigm to claim as their own, the Norquists of the world have all the excuse they need to reduce a messy world to painfully simplistic causes that play perfectly with the low-information voters in swing districts.

It would be tempting to presume a January 20th expiration date on such laments, to believe that some sort of corner has been turned. But the bitter reality of the matter is that Mr. Obama’s performance was at its shakiest when he found himself confronted by a self-appointed Ohio foot soldier so perfect for the slick-sided provincialism of the modern conservative economics that he was drafted by the McCain campaign as its chief spokesman before the sun had set. It won’t get any easier from there.

The Democrats will not win an economics argument in this country on the basis of raw numbers alone; they never do. Now that the electoral battle has been won, the Democrats must take a big-picture approach to winning the larger war. Selling complex, messy ideas like progressive income taxes (to say nothing of the restoration of a modicum of governmental oversight) will require a fresh infusion of street-smart packaging to match such hate-button phrases as “death tax.” To do so will be to fight fire with fire. If the Obama administration dismisses such efforts as quotidian (or, worse, elitist), or if it presumes victory before the fact on the strength of its mandate, they could surely suffer the same fate as wide-eyed Democratic administrations in years past. The good news is that they’re already winning this P.R. battle with cool-headed, pragmatic appointments and centrist views. In other words, they’re winning it the same way they won the election.

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? Battleground Snapshot: Florida

Of all the states that are still realistically in play, pride-of-place belongs once again to the Sunshine State–at least in terms of electoral votes. A person would have to have been living on Mars (or, at the very least, not involved enough in the unfolding political drama to be reading these words) not to know that Florida’s 27 electoral votes constitute a whopping ten percent of the total necessary to secure the White House. So why aren’t both campaigns running more exclusively in such a plum target?
The short answer is, all other things being equal, that it would indeed make a lot more sense to follow Hillary Clinton’s leftover advice from the primary campaigns and focus on fewer, riper targets like Florida and Ohio (for the Democrats) and Pennsylvania (for the Republicans). Trouble is, all things are not equal–especially in Florida. Most people who don’t live in the state (as does this author) think of it in understandably thumbnailed terms as a place disproportionately represented by seniors, Hispanics, and the hospitality industry.

By those metrics, of course, it should be a ripe state for Democratic plucking. However, there are some small problems with this. First, the term “Hispanic” (always offensive, but perhaps nowhere more so than here) would presume to lump citrus farm laborers and light industrial employees in the central portions of the state together with the large and growing population of more Republican-friendly expatriates from Cuba. Mr. McCain’s high-profile waffling on immigration reform probably hurts him with both camps, but the shocking bellicosity of his foreign policy stance probably wins back most of the latter group.

Second, the senior vote, which normally leans Democratic, is complicated by the obvious demographic (not to say ethnic) disparities between the candidates. However, Mr. Obama’s choice of Joe Biden for his running mate, and Mr. McCain’s failure to pick either Charlie Crist or Joe Lieberman, have both tilted the senior vote back toward Obama. In addition, the Obama campaign has recently done a much better job of targeting McCain’s senior-unfriendly positions on Social Security and health care.

Next, the heart-of-Dixie voters are, of course, solidly pro-McCain, and make no mistake: they constitute nearly as sizable a voting bloc here as in other, more demonstrably “southern” states nearby. According to a recently published demographic breakdown, Florida ranks 13th in the nation for military veterans and seventeenth in the nation for both self-identifying “Evangelical Christians” and the percentage of voters registered as Republican. All of these statistics may be attributed to the Dixie vote.

In a “normal” election (is there any such thing?), the three most heavily populated counties in the state, down in the southeastern corner–Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach–are supposed to go heavily for the Democrat (together with the counties containing Daytona, Gainesville, and Tallahassee). The bulk of the state is supposed to go heavily for the Republican, and the gigantic, monolithic suburb that stretches from Tampa Bay to the Atlantic Ocean along the Interstate 4 corridor is supposed to decide who wins. But this year there are signs that the normal coalitions may be significantly more fluid. For example, a ballot initiative that would constitutionally prohibit gay marriage seems to have had little traction in pitching up the culture wars, particularly against the backdrop of a recent story ranking the state third in the country for foreclosures. By contrast, the Jewish senior vote has been comparatively cool in its support for Senator Obama, even after his selection of the wildly popular Joe Biden to be his running mate.

It’s possible to find good news for both candidates in the literal state of the race here as well: One recent report indicated that the in-person early voting has been breaking by an improbably large 2:1 margin for Obama, and a second has suggested that Obama’s lead in this department has already surpassed the built-in advantage that Republicans always enjoy with mail-in absentee ballots. By contrast, the polling for the state has been improbably volatile in the same time period that so many other places seem to be in the middle of a clear blue trend. In addition, the McCain/Palin team is hopeful that the Mahoney scandal, coupled with the emergence of the campaign’s latest narrative–“Obama the redistributor”–will rally their demoralized troops on Election Day.

Under any scenario, Florida may be an unusually big plum (or would that be a big orange?), but it is also an unusually difficult one for either party to count on. With so many factions, so many media markets, so many contradicting agendas and galvanized constituencies, with such high-profile voting irregularities and clunky machines, and no scientifically repeatable metric for anticipating who will turn out and who won’t from race to race (compare 2000 to 2004), it would seem that any candidate basing his or her electoral fortunes on Florida is making an enormous, not to say reckless, gamble.

And if one needs further proof of Mr. Obama’s command of the electoral map, consider that he and he alone may comfortably reach the 270 electoral vote total without the need to recount hanging chads.

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? Debate Reaction: Reaching for a Knockout

On one level, a person has to hand it to John McCain: He had a much more difficult path to victory in Wednesday’s debate, since he faced so much more difficult a path to changing the dynamic of the larger election. He had to attack Obama without seeming overtly shrill and ugly; he had to lay out a coherent plan on the economy without it sounding like yet another major shift in his own campaign narrative–since there had been so many already. By most of the pundit assessments, Mr. McCain outperformed relative to what most of us have come to expect.

And it wasn’t nearly, nearly enough.

As Obama sat stoically, grinning, sipping water, McCain flexed his eyebrows and gritted his teeth. The “Joe the Plumber” narrative positively wowed the news analysts, but the focus groups hated those references, and, in an unusually telling post-debate moment, Joe The Plumber, himself. was unable to tell Katie Couric on national television who it was he’d decided to vote for. When Obama suggested getting the discussion back onto the issues, McCain decided that was the moment to bring up Bill Ayers, and the dials responded like the altimeters on a crashing airplane.

This was easily the most lopsided debate contest I’ve yet seen, and I’m old enough to have seen most of them. Unfortunately for Mr. McCain, it was a lopsided contest in favor of the Good Guy.

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? Economic Development: Lessons From Boston

Before I came to academia, I worked for eleven years in the field of economic development, a profession which is about many different things but, above all, about stealing some other city’s businesses with public money. By the time I was smart enough to form my own doubts about the job, I’d gotten good enough at it to be hired by the City of Fort Lauderdale to run their dedicated “Corporate Headquarters Recruitment” program–itself intended to exonerate the seven meanest, richest people in south Florida from standing accountable for their stupidly over-built downtown office market.

My first assignment (after one of the meanest and richest had gotten done refusing even to accept my business card, that is), was to spend a week in Boston–presumably stealing everything but the drapes. It was the first job because it was also supposed to have been the easiest one. What business its right mind would choose to stay in one of the most expensive markets in the world, both in terms of labor and tax burden, when new technologies enabled it to swap these out for beachside condos and blended drinks on Las Olas Boulevard? We’d even hired a marketing firm to pre-screen fifty or so contacts in Beantown who’d agreed at least in principal to consider the idea.
Know how many we got?

For five grueling days, I crisscrossed the greater Boston area, from Newton to Randolph and back to downtown, glad handing corporate real estate professionals in industries ranging from telemedicine to fiber optics to clutch plates, and not a single one of them expressed even the cursory interest that it would have taken to accede to an all-expenses-paid junket to South Florida. None of them. Zilch. Nada.

What could possibly have gone wrong? I mean to say, we were both cheaper and sunnier–the two things that Republicans have been telling us a business demands from its hosts, at least going back to Reagan and Stockman and the first ugly invocation of the words “supply side.” To hear them tell it, a chance to save half or more on both the labor and the tax-line items and sit on a beach after work every day to boot should have been the pitch that lobs itself. And yet there they were, their cars bogged in slushy parking lots, all but laughing me out of their offices.

It’s a single anecdote, of course, but it’s a powerful one, precisely for what it teaches us by counterexample about the fundamentally wrong-headed assumptions behind Republican economics. In their headlong rush to the sandy slopes of Mount Business-Friendly, Republicans have forgotten one of the most long-standing and crucial rules of Business: You get what you pay for.

True, costs are higher in Boston. But in Boston those higher costs are offset by the appeal of a significantly better-trained and more professionally minded workforce, having gotten that way through the benefit of some of the most well-funded educational infrastructure on all of planet earth, joined to its workplaces with some of the best physical infrastructure on earth, with most of both either directly paid for or at the very least subsidized, with public money.

That this story is such a cruelly perfect microcosm of America’s fading star on the global economic stage is a suggestion that hardly requires a rehabilitated economic developer to make: We’ve transformed the United States into the low-priced knockoff of the world, a place where leisure is vastly more important than ownership in one’s efforts, business decisions are based on instant gratification, college graduates can’t answer simple questions about the geography of their own country, and only those born into families of power and privilege are allowed to seek the highest office in the land without being dismissed as egocentric celebrities. And the world has taken notice, even if we haven’t, outsourcing all but its most menial tasks to places we’d never have dreamed of losing our jobs to, even ten years ago. And all the distressed mortgage buyouts on the planet aren’t going to fix that.

No, the way back to greatness for the United States is to start taking a few more lessons from the supposedly high-cost, anti-business climate up in Boston, and not through slashing taxes on those fortunate few who already pay some of the world’s lowest taxes for persons of their station. The way to fix this quieter, bigger mess of lost American industrial prominence is to redouble our investments in physical and social infrastructure.

And the way to start is to elect Barack Obama on November 4th to be our nation’s forty-forth President.

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? Debate Reaction: Onside Kick Goes Out of Bounds?

For days now, the electoral analogies have all been from the world of sports–McCain is out of time outs, McCain needs a “standing-eight,” and the McCain/Palin ticket is trailing late in the fourth and needs to recover an onside kick. I liked the last of these analogies even before tonight’s debate, seeing as how a recent article on ProTrade suggests that over sixty percent of surprise onside kicks in the middle of a game are successful, while those of the sort Mr. McCain needs (the ones the other side sees coming) work less than twenty percent of the time. Seems like a pretty fitting summary of the way that things stand these days, now, doesn’t it?

By all appearances, the team expecting the onside kick was the one better prepared and ready to execute on the Nashville stage. Obama was cool, Presidential, ready on every point, and very much in charge. McCain opened with a strong gambit to order the federal government to buy up all the bad home mortgages in the country–which will play for a few hours, but which Obama will immediately counter tomorrow morning with McCain’s own words, dating as recently as March, calling for further deregulation of the finance industry. It was a bold move by the trailing candidate, exactly what the doctor ordered, except for the small problem that after that first act, McCain’s performance rapidly unraveled into a series of bad jokes, moments of anxious insistence, and what may well be regarded the next day as a racist slur when he referred to Senator Obama as “that one.”

Obama, meanwhile, counterpunched extremely effectively on the subject of attacking Iraq and made massive headway on the question of which one of these two candidates is really the “steady hand at the tiller.” It may be true that Obama was cooler, more professorial, and playing this debate “not to lose,” but McCain in reaching farther back for a bigger hit, played much less consistently and left himself open to a series of unflattering sound bites.

It wasn’t quite a final, decisive recovery of possession for Obama, but if the football analogy really works, it probably means that the ball McCain needed to fall on rolled harmlessly out of bounds. It’s one day closer to the final whistle, and the McCain/Palin ticket would seem to have shown its last trick play. Barring a truly dramatic change of subject, it is Obama’s team hoisting the trophy on the morning of November 5th.

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? A Blue Victory in a Sea of Red?

With so many signals pointing dramatically in the direction of an Obama victory, it is perhaps worth pausing for a moment to reflect on how monumental this would be from a historical perspective. Specifically, it would only be the second time since 1964–forty-four years ago–that a Democrat has won an election with more than 50 percent of the vote.

There are two typical explanations for this dramatic skewing of party fortunes: (1) the combined aging of the Baby Boomers and death of those who remembered the Great Depression, and (2) the shattering impact of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movement on the blue-collar/academic coalition that had won the Democrats their Presidential supremacy in all but two of the elections from 1932 to 1964. However, it could easily be argued that something far more significant also has occurred during the modern era. The basic fabric of social interaction in this country has changed in ways that make us drastically more selfish than we’ve ever been before.

This trend is most visible in the evolution of consumer technologies, the sea change in residential property development, the profound changes in television, and, perhaps most chilling of all, the stoic acceptance of the first three by persons one might have thought most likely to support an alternative view. A casual list of household products, which did not exist in 1964, will identify scarcely any that require so much as a second family member to enjoy, much less a neighbor from down the street.

And what of that street, itself? In 1964, it would have been connected at both ends by right-angle intersections and flanked left and right by sidewalks. In today’s suburbia, it is far more likely to be a dead end, winding with phony bucolic laziness past houses with sprawling front lawns on which no one may safely play. In the interest of affording each of us a living arrangement free from the risks of declining property value, competing uses, and neighbors of color, our property developers have built a dystopia in which the transit back and forth to work takes ninety minutes and every human interaction requires the use of a stunted delivery truck and its appalling gas mileage to consummate.

Understandably, the nation’s children have retreated to the comfy embrace of television, a medium whose conservative bias arises both from the sharp racial divides that have arisen from a mind-boggling segmentation in programming and from shockingly insular advertising messages that have followed. True, there may still be journalists who press the Orwellian nightmare-makers of the right wing to defend their statements and their actions, but those journalists may hold the field only until the first commercial break, after which a booming message of instant gratification and a non-existence of social need swoops down to reset the outrage. With these influences has come the last, greatest tragedy of the modern American electoral dialogue: the dialogue itself. The American vernacular has evolved a right-wing bias in almost all matters.

However, within this context, things seem to be gradually shifting. Spurred by rising energy costs, fears of global warning, and a the most progressive younger generation in 40 years, Americans are finally starting to shift priorities. The 2006 midterm elections, the declining relative value of suburban home values, the financial crisis, and mass support behind an unconventional presidential candidate all point to a possible swing back to ideals lost somewhere in the 1960s.

With the passage of the bailout bill and the crippling deficits already left behind by the folly of Iraq, the next President will have to do something that has not been done in a long, long time–he will have to lead, in the conventional, less-popular sense of the term. Difficult choices will have to be made, and the next President will have to lead the discussion into seeing those choices through. Fortunately, for all of us, the only man in this race who is even theoretically capable of reaching to such heights is now also the front-runner in this election.

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? VP Debate Reactions: Part 2

Let no one say that Sarah Palin didn’t do an exemplary job in her debate with Joe Biden; she did. She was engaging, she was folksy, she was in far better command of the material than any of us expected. I wouldn’t have winked, I wouldn’t have clinched my teeth, and I certainly wouldn’t have pressed on talking points that Biden had already debunked. But she certainly outperformed relative to her expectations, and there’s not a person in the country who can say otherwise in good faith.

Too bad for her that someone else was up there on the stage. From start to finish, Biden refused to shrink from the conventional job of a VP nominee. He didn’t let Palin get away with saying that Obama would raise taxes on people when he wouldn’t, and he didn’t let her have the last word when she tried to recycle a sound bite he’d already swatted down. Instead of demurring to her gender, as Team Blue had promised he might, Biden came out swinging, strongly disagreeing with her, oblivious to her gender, and ready on
every point.

Most columnists agreed that Palin had the lower expectations at the outset, but significantly fewer pundits noted that she also had the far more challenging objective to reverse the near comic tailspin in which the McCain ticket has found itself over the past ten to fifteen days. The undecided have been breaking hard for the challengers, with national tracking polls showing Obama leading by as many as eleven points, and an electoral map that’s lit as blue as a store-closing sale at a K-Mart. In the past three news cycles, Senator McCain has fumbled the repair of Palin’s Pakistan answer, he nearly came to blows with the Editorial Board of the Des Moines Register, and he apparently conceded the outcome in one of the few Kerry states in which he had been competing until recently, Michigan. This election is now–has been for some time now–Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s to lose.

Sinking Governor Palin neck deep into this kind of hothouse atmosphere, with those kinds of stakes (especially after her recent performances) was nothing short of electoral malpractice on the part of Team Crankypants. However, to her credit, Palin did nothing, absolutely nothing to hurt McCain’s cause. The trouble is that when you’re eleven points down, doing nothing to hurt your own cause isn’t going to cut it.

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? A Different Take on the Expectations for Palin

Many of the most seasoned pundits are of the opinion that each time Sarah Palin commits another gaffe, she makes her job easier in the Vice Presidential Debate by lowering the public expectations. Certainly there are many examples in history of a less-than-stellar orator winning a debate by split-decision, for no better reason than because he or she exceeded the lower threshold that had been set for him or her. And anyone who hesitates to agree need look no further than the 2000 debate performance of the White House’s current occupant. When the public expects one candidate to dominate the other, so sayeth the conventional wisdom, these expectations leave that apparently superior candidate with the narrower window in which to perform well without dog-piling on his hapless opponent across the stage.

All of this worked in 2000 precisely because the general public had little basis for doubting Mr. Bush’s core competency to hold down the job. True, he had performed dreadfully in a series of now infamous Sunday-morning news interviews. (”I know how hard it is to put food on your family.” “Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?” “I understand the challenges of small business: I was one.”) But the general public–or at the very least, that segment of the general public that is still undecided at the end of Setpember–doesn’t watch Sunday-morning news interviews. To them Mr. Bush was a self-confident, likable guy who was true to his word, essentially untarnished by scandal (as far as they knew), and ready to take the Lewinsky-weary country in a new direction that included big, ripe checks in the mail for everybody. Indeed in hindsight it is a small miracle that Mr. Gore fared as well as he did under the circumstances.

Governor Palin, by contrast, has burned her honeymoon capital with the media and the larger body politic–first by repeatedly lying with respect to the “Bridge to Nowhere,” even after the lie was documented, then by stonewalling an investigation started by state legislators of her own party, and finally by spectacularly and very visibly mangling her should-have-been-rehearsed answers to the interview questions being posed by the unimpeachably non-partisan Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric. By the time of the second installment of her Couric interview she was already the least-favorably viewed of the four major candidates, and shortly thereafter she was called upon to remove herself from the ticket, both by CNN’s self-appointed national conscience, Jack Cafferty, and by National Review columnist Kathleen Parker. The latter is the far more devastating blow, since Ms. Parker may not be summarily dismissed as either an Obama supporter or as a sexist in the McCain campaign’s now daily conference calls to blast the treatment they’re getting.

In the meantime Palin has continued to dig herself an even deeper hole, first by refusing to directly answer questions about her acceptance of over $25,000 in gifts, and then by seeming to contradict her boss on the subject of surgical strikes on terrorist bases in Pakistan. She’s been mocked by Tina Fey and David Letterman, and her very image alone is generally enough to start Jon Stewart’s audiences at the Daily Show into a fit of merciless cackling. If nothing else, it sure does seem like a long time ago that anyone was worried too much about what might tumble unexpectedly from the lips of Joe Biden!

To put it bluntly, the public has seen what it needs to see in order to have grave doubts about Governor Palin’s basic intellectual competency to stand a heartbeat away from the Oval Office. And those are not the sorts of low expectations upon which a candidate may capitalize. Indeed the true state of the situation is probably closer to the opposite. Barring a major surprise victory against Joe Biden, one which shows her both thoroughly in command of the the discussion and thoroughly proficient on issues that she has not thus far demonstrated any aptitude whatsoever, the persuadable voters watching the contest will undoubtedly resolve that the Alaska Governor has just officially run herself out of chances.

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? The Navy Man and the Celebrity

On October 28, 1980, the country was in the midst of a precipitous economic decline, faced steep gas prices, felt saddled with an unpopular incumbent President, and had been recently and very visibly humbled on the world stage by radical elements in the Middle East. In the final act of their election contest, an aging and tired-looking former Naval officer took the stage for his first (and only) debate with the man his campaign had portrayed as a dangerous, impulsive, Hollywood celebrity who lacked both the experience and the soundness of judgment to respond to far-flung threats in foreign fields.

We all know what happened next.

Governor Reagan, bruised and bloodied by this tireless ad-war, came across (to many who were seeing him for the first time), as smooth, likable, and imminently worthy of the job. A few days later the election was decided in one of the biggest landslides up to that time, and, good or bad, the country has never really been quite the same since.

The story is only noteworthy in our present context because it is our present context. Pundits arguing this past week that debates have little impact on elections have cited data points ranging from the first Kerry-Bush debate (which Kerry won to very little effect on the race) all the way back to the first Reagan-Mondale debate (which Mondale won to even less effect). Those pundits have, to this author’s thinking at least, missed the story completely.

The problem is that not all election contests are created equal. John Kerry’s big debate win in 2004 didn’t have much effect on the contest because the 2004 election was a culture war, with both sides locked-in well in advance and almost no one left in the middle to persuade. Fritz Mondale’s big debate win in 1984 didn’t have much effect on the contest because, in 1984, Mr. Reagan could have taken the stage dressed only in a fig leaf and spent the entire ninety minutes speaking in tongues, and he still would have carried 39 states. To include either of these two races in a regression to determine the significance of debates, is to short-change the potential for debates to matter in elections where the electorate had not completely made up their mind about one candidate or another prior to the debate(s).

Specifically in those races where one candidate is decidedly less palatable, but the other candidate is “scary” or “new” enough to not have yet pulled away, do debates seem to afford their best chance to really shake up the dynamics of an election. In other words, an election where voters want change, but have yet to be completely convinced that they can trust this change. We’ve had three such elections since the advent of televised debates, in 1960, 1980, and 2008. And the “scary” candidate has won the first two, just by taking the stage for his first debate and not being scary. The first debate has thus been what has put the “new” candidate over this threshold of acceptability as a viable alternative to the failing status quo.

Very few among us remember how fatigued the country was with the Eisenhower Administration in the summer and autumn of 1960. Several scandals had broken more or less at once, and the Powers affair had wrought a devastating blow to American pride, prompting renowned Columnist James Reston to skewer the incumbents in language that seems more fitting for today’s scrappy environment, and also eerily adaptable to the current occupants of the White House.

Against this backdrop, Mr. Nixon could only base his argument for the job on the un-readiness of his opponent, a young, good-looking, and little-known Senator. Wisely (indeed uncharacteristically wisely), Nixon left to his surrogates the question of what effect Mr. Kennedy’s Catholicism might have on his governance. But no matter: The race was decided by Mr. Kennedy’s Presidential appearance and his calm demeanor. If there was no longer any reason to fear Kennedy, there was also no longer any reason to vote Nixon.

Twenty years later, one might have expected the sharp cookies in the Carter Administration to assume that Reagan would not play directly into their hands by throwing his bellicose weight around on stage. But Carter was unpopular not just for the devastating economic malaise that had descended over the country, but also for the humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis, which was first-lead on the evening news for the comfortable majority of the 555 days over which it took place. Carter’s only card was that people should be scared of Reagan. When Reagan no longer seemed scary, the public decided it had seen enough to make up its mind.

There is obviously still time for Senator McCain to break this cycle (not to mention time for current events to shift to a more favorable playing field on which he might show his strengths). But with each passing day, almost with each passing hour, it is Mr. Obama who comes nearer and nearer to passing what Karl Rove once famously referred to as “the living-room test.” Would the American public be comfortable hearing from this man, for four to six minutes a night, on their evening news, and not be scared of what he might say? It would seem the answer to that question got a lot less qualified in the minds of many voters after the first debate. And that’s a trend that Senator McCain must shatter to pieces with an act far more brazenly game changing than a “mere” suspension of his campaign, if he still hopes and expects to become our nation’s forty-fourth President.

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