First of all, one thing that seems certain is that this alignment will result in Chuck Schumer running unopposed for re-election. Paterson and the new Senator, as well as the newly elected State Senators who have given the Democrats a majority in the State Senate, will all be juicy but expensive targets to take on in a state that tilts heavily Democratic; the NY GOP can only spare so many resources, and even in a good year for Republicans (as 2010 is likely to be), and Schumer is nearly bulletproof unless he goes the way of Spitzer.

Second, I don't think Bill Clinton will be interested in the job. Hillary, frankly, is apparently jumping at being Secretary of State to escape the dull anonymity of the Senate (bear in mind that Democratic Senators lacking seniority and committee chairmanships will now be expected to fall quietly in line with the Obama agenda no less than his Cabinet members) for the world stage and never have to campaign in Rochester and Buffalo again. I don't see Bill wanting to become a freshman legislator.

Third, while David Paterson is a protege of Charlie Rangel, Rangel's powerful position as Ways and Means Chairman means he won't be much interested in a "promotion" to the Senate. Likewise, Louise Slaughter would have been the logical choice among upstate Congresspersons, but Slaughter is 79 and chair of the House Rules Committee; like Rangel, she's too powerful and too old to leave her House slot and start over.

So who does that leave? There would appear to be five logical contenders.

(1) Andrew Cuomo is the logical favorite, for reasons of naked self-interest (Paterson fears, justifiably, that the State Attorney General and former HUD Secretary may challenge him for the nomination for his dad's old job). Cuomo has no particular regional base in the state - his father was from Queens, but Andrew has spent years in Albany and Washington - but has statewide name recognition and has won statewide election. Brian Faughnan suggests that the camera-hungry Schumer may be opposed to Paterson picking the high-profile Cuomo. Of course, Cuomo's tenure at HUD will sooner or later lead to tough questions about his role at the creation of the housing crisis. A Cuomo appointment would also set off a second round of musical chairs, as the AG job is a powerful one with many open investigations.

(2) Kirsten Gillibrand - I agree with ironman at Next Right that Gillibrand is a strong contender. Paterson is a black urban liberal from Harlem (if that's not redundant); to win statewide, he needs to draw support from upstate and reach out to white and/or Latino voters. Tabbing Gillibrand has the hallmarks of the classic ticket-balancer: she's relatively young (42), telegenic, Catholic, a mother of two young children and represents a traditionally Republican district she won in 2006 from the excessively hard-partying John Sweeney. Gillibrand might want to get out of Dodge - her district is sooner or later going to give her a tough re-election battle (in 2008, Gillibrand and her self-funding opponent combined to raise more money than the combatants in any other Congressional district in the country), and as Clyde Haberman notes, New York is likely to lose Congressional seats by 2012, so Democrats in marginal upstate districts will be scrambling to hold on.

The downside? Egos (of which New York politics has a perennial surplus) would be bruised if Gillibrand leapfrogs over more veteran lawmakers, including her old boss Cuomo (who she worked for at HUD). Democrats could well lose her House seat. And liberals may not be happy with picking a member of the Blue Dog caucus who has a 100% rating from the NRA, opposed Eliot Spitzer's plan to give drivers' licenses to illegal aliens, is a sponsor of the SAVE Act and of employer verification of legal status of workers and, supports making the Bush tax cuts permanent. (I'd expect her to drift leftward in the Senate, but if you're a Democrat looking to install someone in a safe seat, you might want someone more reliable).

(3) Nydia Velazquez - Another NY City arch-liberal (she voted to investigate President Bush for impeachment proceedings over the Iraq War), Congresswoman Velazquez - the chair of the Hispanic Caucus and the first Puerto Rican woman elected to Congress - would cement Paterson's ties with Latino voters. There's speculation that she may prefer running the Hispanic Caucus, which makes little enough sense to me, and I'm not sure how well she would play in a statewide election. Wikipedia notes that "During her [1992] campaign for the House seat, her medical records, including documented clinical depression and an attempted suicide [in 1991], were leaked to the press. She quickly held a press conference and said that she had been undergoing counseling for years and was emotionally and psychologically healthy." (This 1992 NYT report discusses the suicide attempt.)

(4) Byron Brown, the Mayor of Buffalo and a former State Senator. Brown is African-American, a mixed blessing for Paterson if he's looking to expand his appeal across racial/ethnic lines, but he's also the mayor of a key upstate city. Brown's record as an executive means he's less immediately identifiable along hot-button voting lines.

(5) Brian Higgins, a Congressman also from Buffalo, first elected in 2004. Higgins claims to be a New Democrat but is a much more conventional liberal than Gillibrand.

As for the GOP side, it remains to be seen. Mayor Bloomberg, now an Independent, has twisted many arms in the City Council to remove term limits so he can run for a third term in 2009; I assume that means he's staying put in 2010. Rudy Giuliani probably couldn't win a statewide election for the Senate at this point, but would be a very strong candidate for Governor if he was more motivated than during his disappointing presidential campaign; if the voters are unhappy with Albany, well, lots of politicians run on "change" but no living political figure has a record of bringing about as dramatic change as Giuliani did as Mayor of New York. Combative, maverick Long Island Congressman Peter King has talked about running for the Governorship as well, but King would probably be the GOP's strongest candidate for the Senate seat, depending who Paterson picks.

It's going to be an interesting two years here in the Empire State.

Washington National Cathedral also transcends politics and even the separation of religions. Though nominally an Episcopal church, it welcomes everyone. It is at once deeply Christian and deeply interfaith. The Episcopal Church has a long history of inclusiveness. The first black bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, John Walker, presided there. Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, the first female presiding bishop in the Episcopal Church, was inducted there. And Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson of the Diocese of New Hampshire was the first openly gay bishop in Christendom. "We are a place that welcomes people of all faiths and no faith," says Lloyd, echoing Barack Obama's words of two years ago. "Whatever we once were," Obama said then, "we're no longer just a Christian nation. At least not just. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation and a Buddhist nation and a Hindu nation and a nation of nonbelievers."

***

The cathedral sponsors programs on interfaith dialogue with Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Bahais and people of other faiths. Former president Mohammad Khatami of Iran attended a Christian-Muslim-Judaic conference there in 2006. Twice a year, there is an Abrahamic roundtable with Bishop John Chane, Rabbi Bruce Lustig and professor Akbar Ahmed of American University's School of International Service. Last spring, a "Lighting to Unite" event concluded the centennial. The theme: "One Spirit among many nations." With a background of sound and lights, the festival drew believers and nonbelievers from all over the country. "We wanted them to experience their humanity," says Lloyd, "to have the sense that they shared a common life with each other."

I am drawn to the cathedral over all of the other sacred spaces in Washington because it is the most pluralistic of the places of worship I've been to.

On Nov. 12, Deepak Chopra, a Hindu, spoke there to a packed house. Asked about Obama in the question-and-answer session afterward, he said that the president-elect "has transcended religious identity. Just imagine when he puts his hand on the Bible to be sworn in and says, 'I, Barack Hussein Obama' . . . How wonderful!"

It would indeed be wonderful for the country to have a president who worshiped at a place most likely to welcome all Americans and all people of the world alike.

Now, peaceful civil relations between people of all faiths, or no faiths, is a good thing. Governmental recognition that we are a nation of people of all faiths, or no faiths, is a good thing. But this is pretty much the worst possible way to choose a church, the purpose of which is precisely the promotion of a single faith in the belief that it is the true path to God. You don't feed the body by browsing the supermarket; you pick food and eat it. You don't house the body by roaming the neighborhood; you pick a home to sleep in at night. Quinn's recommendation that the Obamas settle for spiritual homelessness is bad for their souls and, ultimately, bad for the nation if we are to be led by a lost soul. And it's even bad politics; a city as overwhelmingly African-American as Washington would be deeply offended if the nation's first black president chose, for reasons other than denominational compulsion, to turn up his nose at the District's many black churches. Quinn is, whether she realizes it or not, patronizing Obama by assuming that he has no particular faith, an attitude common to liberal opinions about Obama's faith. (It's likewise similar to the media's bafflement, in dealing with Sarah Palin, at the idea that she would pray for divine guidance in considering whether to run for president in 2012.

Meanwhile, the Obamas have already made a significant life-in-Washington decision by choosing to send their daughters to Sidwell Friends, one of the capital's most exclusive private schools, rather than sending them to one of the city's crummy (and largely black) public schools. I won't criticize this decision; it's undoubtedly the best educational option for the girls, and the Obamas' entry into politics doesn't forfeit their children's right to the best education their parents can afford to give them. But it would be nice if President Obama uses his influence to give the parents of other DC children more choices in getting their children into better schools. As I've said before, being a hypocrite may be bad, but making bad public policy is worse. If a little fear of the hypocrisy charge gives Obama pause in thinking about whether other DC families should have more educational choices, then his decision about where to educate his daughters will pay benefits for more than just the new First Family.

"You have reached the position of president, and a heavy legacy of failure and crimes awaits you. A failure in Iraq to which you have admitted, and a failure in Afghanistan to which the commanders of your army have admitted," the message [from Zawahiri] said.

On the subject of Iraq, the message said that while "evidence of America's defeat in Iraq appeared years ago, Bush and his administration continued to be stubborn and deny the brilliant midday sun."

"If Bush has achieved anything, it is in his transfer of America's disaster and predicament to his successor. But the American people, by electing Obama, declared its anxiety and apprehension about the future towards which the policy of the likes of Bush is leading it, and so it decided to support someone calling for withdrawal from Iraq."

He really should stop doing that. (UPDATE: Here, too).

If you are wondering, November 2 was the last time the Daily News didn't have Obama's picture on the front page.

Howard Kurtz has more on the media gold rush of fawning Obama commemoratives.

Sources here, here and here, from the master GPO budget-history site here. House/Senate historical partisan breakdowns here and here.

The budget data is explained here, including this note on fiscal years:

The Federal fiscal year begins on October 1 and ends on the subsequent September 30. It is designated by the year in which it ends; for example, fiscal year 2007 began on October 1, 2006, and ended on September 30, 2007. Prior to fiscal year 1977 the Federal fiscal years began on July 1 and ended on June 30. In calendar year 1976 the July-September period was a separate accounting period (known as the transition quarter or TQ) to bridge the period required to shift to the new fiscal year.

I use 1947 as a starting point, as it's the first year after full demobilization from World War II; the war budgets were colossal - in Fiscal Year 1943, the deficit was over 30% of GDP. And before the New Deal, federal spending was generally less than 10% of GDP.

You can see this in the bold passages in what I quoted: you have some people saying fiscal conservatism is about low taxes, but then you have Chafee voting for higher taxes and opposing tax cuts proposed and passed by a Republican President and Congress, also on the theory of being "fiscally conservative." These people can't agree what they stand for.

The problem is that too many people have gotten locked into two notions peddled by the Democrats and their media allies: that balancing the budget is the be-all and end-all of "fiscal conservatism," and that spending cuts are impossible, so the only way to ever balance the budget is to raise taxes - and then, when spending keeps rising, raise them again. The WaPo, typically, simply assumes these premises.

No wonder voters who want lower taxes abandoned these people. And maybe if they'd made a concerted effort to beat back overspending, they'd have been listened to. It is a fair criticism of Bush and the GOP Congress that they failed to restrain federal spending, and even added a new and hugely costly entitlement by adding prescription drug coverage to Medicare. But where were the Northeastern "fiscal conservatives" when the spending battles were going unfought? Where were they when the GOP nominated a genuine spending hawk for President in John McCain and he couldn't even win New Hampshire? In fact, studies have repeatedly shown that the best spending records in the GOP come from people like Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint who are also rock-ribbed social conservatives. Even in the Northeast, the guy who's fought the toughest spending battles is Rhode Island Gov. Don Carcieri, a solid social conservative. (Cato, for example, gives Carcieri the best fiscal report card of any Republican Governor in the Northeast). The social liberals in the party, with precious few exceptions, haven't held up their end of the deal.

Consider two candidates. Candidate A promises that he'll spend 15 cents for every dollar you make, and tax you 12; he'll make up the difference by issuing Treasury bills. Candidate B promises you a balanced budget...he'll spend 22 cents of every dollar and tax you 22. If your interest is in smaller government and lower taxes, how can you favor Candidate B? How can you call Candidate B the "fiscal conservative" if you intend that term to have any meaning whatsoever?

I suppose if you play with the numbers long enough you can argue that excessive federal deficit financing leads to runaway growth in interest expenditures, but in the real world the federal government has the world's lowest borrowing rate and has rarely been close to as heavily leveraged (in terms of debt service as a percentage of annual expenditures) as the kinds of corporations that get themselves in serious trouble with too much debt. Some debt is healthy. And even if you are concerned about deficits, the cure is certainly not to let spending run free and just keep jacking up taxes; it's to bring spending in line with tax revenues. That's what living within your means is really about.

The key to winning back voters disenchanted with the GOP as a steward of taxpayer funds is spending and the size of government; show we can cut those, and broader support will follow. I don't agree with all of P.J. O'Rourke's diagnoses but he's surely right that the GOP lost credibility by failing to deliver tangible progress in shrinking the federal footprint. The opportunity for the GOP's revival will come from the fact that the whole federal government is now in the hands of people who intend to expand that footprint like there's no tomorrow. Sarah Palin gets this, as several Republican Governors do, but of course, she and other GOP Governors who grasp the theory now have to go back and prove they can pare back their own state budgets in tough economic times. Because at the end of the day, holding the line on spending is the real test of fiscal conservatism.

There's a simple measure of sanity in housing prices: the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, it runs around 3 to 1; by late 2004, it had risen nationally to 4 to 1. "All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries," Zelman says. "But the problem wasn't just that it was 4 to 1. In Los Angeles, it was 10 to 1, and in Miami, 8.5 to 1. And then you coupled that with the buyers. They weren't real buyers. They were speculators."

+++

The juiciest shorts - the bonds ultimately backed by the mortgages most likely to default - had several characteristics. They'd be in what Wall Street people were now calling the sand states: Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada. The loans would have been made by one of the more dubious mortgage lenders; Long Beach Financial, wholly owned by Washington Mutual, was a great example. Long Beach Financial was moving money out the door as fast as it could, few questions asked, in loans built to self-destruct. It specialized in asking home­owners with bad credit and no proof of income to put no money down and defer interest payments for as long as possible. In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000.

More generally, the subprime market tapped a tranche of the American public that did not typically have anything to do with Wall Street. Lenders were making loans to people who, based on their credit ratings, were less creditworthy than 71 percent of the population. Eisman knew some of these people. One day, his housekeeper, a South American woman, told him that she was planning to buy a townhouse in Queens. "The price was absurd, and they were giving her a low-down-payment option-ARM," says Eisman, who talked her into taking out a conventional fixed-rate mortgage. Next, the baby nurse he'd hired back in 1997 to take care of his newborn twin daughters phoned him. "She was this lovely woman from Jamaica," he says. "One day she calls me and says she and her sister own five townhouses in Queens. I said, 'How did that happen?'" It happened because after they bought the first one and its value rose, the lenders came and suggested they refinance and take out $250,000, which they used to buy another one. Then the price of that one rose too, and they repeated the experiment. "By the time they were done," Eisman says, "they owned five of them, the market was falling, and they couldn't make any of the payments."

I. It Takes Two Sides To Have A War

A. The False Narrative

At its core, Beinart's thesis is grounded in one of the familiar tropes of passive-aggressive liberal pundits: the idea that the "culture war" - political battles over cultural and social issues ranging from abortion to crime to immigration to racial preferences to same-sex marriage to guns to the role of religion in the public square - consists entirely of conservatives picking fights against liberals who just want us all to get along. In this narrative, two things are true: (1) that liberal positions on, say, economic issues are popular but liberal candidates keep losing elections over cultural issues that shouldn't matter in elections; and (2) that conservative positions on cultural issues are outside the mainstream and doomed by their unpopularity. Of course, it's logically impossible for both of these things to be true (unless liberals win all the time, and it will take more than two bad election cycles to prove that), but that's not really my point.

The point is this: we have political conflict over social and cultural issues because we have two sides that disagree on a broad range of issues, and neither is willing to change its position. If these issues were actually unimportant or indefensible, the side that was losing elections on them would throw in the towel and adapt its positions, as for example happened with the end of the political battles over segregation and Prohibition. And if cultural liberals disdained conflict, they would never start battles on these issues - yet they do so all the time. Indeed, abortion wasn't an issue in national politics until Roe v. Wade; the NRA wasn't a force in politics until liberal politicians pushed increasingly intrusive gun-control measures.

Pundits like Beinart like to frame these issues as a "war" promulgated by only one side because they can pander to the sensibilities of voters who think it's rude to fight about these issues. It's a political strategy designed to seize the moral middle ground. But Beinart and his ilk can't possibly be so insular as to believe that any of this this is true. Let's do a little thought experiment to show the unreality of this entire theme.

B. Imagine There's No Culture War. It Isn't Hard To Do.

Let's imagine that Beinart was right. Let's imagine that social and cultural conflict are political losers. Let's imagine that the wise Democrats who were just swept into power last week have no intention of using government power to alter the social and cultural landscape. Consider what things would be true if that were the case:

(1) Not only would Barack Obama make Supreme Court and other federal judicial nominations entirely without regard to how his nominees might handle hot-button issues like abortion, but Obama would face no significant pressure from interest groups on the Left to choose nominees who would uphold Roe v. Wade, roll back restrictions on racial preferences, etc. These issues simply would not come up at confirmation hearings. In fact, we know that the Democrats raised such hot-button issues in the confirmation hearings of numerous nominees for the Supreme Court and lower federal courts (probably the single Democrat who pressed these issues most frequently was Joe Biden), we know that Democratic candidates were quizzed on the issue throughout the primaries by liberal interest groups, and we know that there is absolutely zero chance that Obama would nominate a Supreme Court Justice who he suspected of being less than 100% committed to upholding Roe.

(2) The Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress would not seek to push change on social and cultural issues through new legislation and executive orders. Yet there is extensive evidence that they will do just that. Obama promised in 2007 that "The first thing I'd do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act. That's the first thing that I'd do" - and FOCA is all about abortion, sweeping and comprehensive new federal legislation to repeal the ban on partial birth abortion, preempt every single state law placing even modest limitations around abortion - "effectively nullify informed consent laws, waiting periods, health safety regulations for abortion clinics, etc." and remove legal protections for doctors and hospitals who refuse as a matter of conscience to perform abortions. Obama's people are talking about rolling out a battery of new executive orders that will go into effect immediately, including on stem cell research and federal funding for abortion providers overseas. (In fact, Obama has said in the past that he opposes the Hyde Amendment, which bars the use of taxpayer money to subsidize abortions in the U.S.). The wish-list of "progressive" actions on social issues is likely to get a lot longer in the weeks to come, and every time you see an Obama Administration or Democratic Congress pushing new laws or new regulations or executive orders on these topics, ask yourself if the Democrats really aren't interested in a battle over the culture.

(3) Democrats would not run campaign commercials seeking to gain political advantage on social and cultural issues. Yet where they believed that they could gain advantages by doing so, they did. Obama was so eager to run ads attacking the GOP for its unpopular opposition to embryonic stem cell research (a big electoral winner for the Democrats in 2006) and attacking Republican opponents of immigration that he cut radio ads claiming that John McCain opposed stem cell research and was anti-illegal immigration *, in both cases the polar opposite of McCain's actual position. Obama ran, in some jurisdictions, ads about abortion, as did many Democrats nationwide (even in a State Senate race in my part of Queens).

(4) Speaking of Sarah Palin, Democrats would not have attacked her on cultural grounds. As Ramesh Ponnuru noted in response to Beinart:

[T]hat bit about Palin's brand is, I think, incorrect. It's not culture-war crusading that made Palin the most popular governor in America. And while it's clear that her being pro-life was a prerequisite for her getting on the ticket this year, I doubt McCain put her on it in order to fight the culture wars: He probably saw her pluses as 1) she's a fresh female face, 2) she's a popular governor, 3) she has a record of fighting corruption, including Republican corruption, and 4) she's acceptable to the party base. The resulting ticket has not done much to elevate the issues of same-sex marriage and abortion.

Palin became a culture-war flashpoint, first, because of the reaction to her by liberals and the counter-reaction by conservatives and, second, because of her adoption of the traditional attack-dog (with lipstick!) role of a vice-presidential candidate.

If you don't believe Ramesh, go back and read Palin's convention speech or her speech when McCain introduced her as his running mate and compare the amount of time she spent talking about hot-button social issues as opposed to economic issues, government reform and national security. It was Obama's supporters who pushed attacks on Palin over things like book-banning, the teaching of evolution, sex education and rape kits, none of which were things Palin set out to talk about in this race.

I'm not suggesting that Palin never engaged in cultural wedge politics, just underlining the fact that an awful lot of the social and cultural wedges driven over Palin came from her opponents, which would not have happened if the culture wars were over as Beinart imagines.

(5) The Democrats would not have picked a culture warrior of the Left as their nominee. Obama is the furthest thing possible from the kind of anodyne, Mark Warner-ish technorat who is concerned only with economic issues and the functioning of government programs. Look back at Barack Obama's career, from the State Senate up through the Democratic primaries, and you'll see that this is a guy who put a disproportionate amount of his time and energy into issues like abortion, sex education, racial profiling, gun control, the death penalty, drivers' licenses for illegal aliens, racial preferences, and race-specific redistricting. His long affiliation with the divisive Jeremiah Wright was, plainly, an effort to play to the cultural sensibilities of his State Senate constituents. The millions of dollars he poured through Bill Ayers into things like "Afrocentric" public education in Chicago was certainly all about cultural politics. (This is aside from the extent to which Obama's "historic" campaign marketed Obama as one big walking racial-politics issue). As noted above, Obama picked as his running mate a guy best known to the country from the Bork, Thomas, Roberts and Alito hearings, and Obama himself voted against Roberts and Alito on strictly ideological grounds. The Democratic Congressional leadership is studded with culture warriors - there are many more Nancy Pelosis there than Harry Reids.

(6) The Left wouldn't have an active infrastructure for pushing its side on social issues in election campaigns. Yet we have, for example, TIME Magazine reporting with a straight face on the existence of a "Gay Mafia" (their term, not mine) pouring money into races over gay issues - "Among gay activists, the Cabinet is revered as a kind of secret gay Super Friends, a homosexual justice league that can quietly swoop in wherever anti-gay candidates are threatening and finance victories for the good guys." (I swear, these are actual quotes from the article). We have Emily's List, "dedicated to building a progressive America by electing pro-choice Democratic women to office." Heck, in North Carolina the Democratic Senate candidate accepted the endorsement of "Godless America PAC."

(7) The Left would accept its losses and move on. Instead, we have fierce battles to take to the courts whatever the cultural Left loses at the ballot box, most recently the lawsuits filed to enjoin Proposition 8, the same-sex marriage ban. A lengthy and concerted campaign also knocked the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative, an anti-racial-preferences proposal, off the ballot.

There is simply no way to look at the Democratic Party as presently constituted, and the interest and pressure groups that support it, and argue with a straight face that they are disinterested in fighting a culture war. They have their positions, they'll fight to win, and they make political hay when they can. It's insulting to our intelligence to claim otherwise.

II. Is Beinart's Side Winning?

The alternative reading of Beinart's argument, which he's not quite willing to come right out and say, is that yes, his side is waging a culture war - and winning. Obviously in the aftermath of a decisive election victory by a candidate like Obama, with increasing margins for the Democratic majorities in Congress and in a number of state legislatures, that's a tempting claim to make. But I'd suggest that there are some cautions before the cultural Left engages in triumphalism here.

The first is the referenda - even if Republicans were quite unpopular on this Election Day, socially conservative positions did a lot better in referenda. Besides Proposition 8 passing a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in gay-friendly deep-blue California, you had similar ballot initiatives pass in Arizona and Florida. A ban on racial preferences passed in Nebraska and a similar measure lost only narrowly in Colorado. (Pro-life initiatives did less well in some places like South Dakota where they were poorly funded). These are not the results you would expect from a nation that has suddenly taken an abrupt left turn.

Second, while the Democrats are still intent on fighting a culture war, their behavior over the past 3-4 years suggests that they nonetheless recognize that there are serious downsides to them doing so. Even with the nomination of Obama, the national party has run away as fast as it can from its previously aggressive agenda on gun control, which is just as bad politics for the Democrats in most districts as stem cells is for most Republicans. Obama did try to avoid talking much about a bunch of the wedge issues he'd used throughout his career. And at the Congressional level, we've seen a lot of putatively pro-life, pro-gun, and even anti-illegal-immigrant Democratic candidates, a nuber of whom have been elected. Only time will tell if these rank-and-file Democrats will have any impact in muting the culture-warrior inclinations of the party's base and leadership, but the fact that they were supported by the party at all suggests that a more conservative stance on many social issues is still necessary to get elected in many parts of this country.

Third, Beinart's own analysis suggests that we shouldn't read too much into 2008:

In 2000, in the wake of an economic boom and a sex scandal that led to a president's impeachment, 22 percent of Americans told exit pollsters that "moral values" were their biggest concern, compared with only 19 percent who cited the economy.

Today, according to a recent Newsweek poll, the economy is up to 44 percent and "issues like abortion, guns and same-sex marriage" down to only 6 percent.

Most analysts of politics and history would find bizarre Beinart's argument that social and cultural issues are off the table during times of economic stress (tell that to Jerry Falwell, who started the Moral Majority during the pit of the Carter years). But an economic crisis eight weeks before a national election is another matter. So social and cultural issues don't seem to have mattered much in this election - well, neither did national security, yet nobody would seriously argue that national security is no longer an issue in American politics. It just happened that we had a race unusually dominated by a sudden economic crisis. Democrats who build a long-term strategy on re-creating those conditions will end up disappointed.

Has the political landscape on social and cultural issues moved left? Certainly the Left is now empowered. But ironically, the status quo argument of pundits like Peter Beinart will become completely and openly indefensible if the next few years are characterized by broad-ranging efforts to use the federal government to impose change on the social and cultural landscape; voters who hate hearing about these issues may discover they're not fond of a party that wants to spend its first month in office pushing taxpayer funding for abortion. If the Democrats believed the culture wars were over, they'd leave them be. If they push their agenda and hit stiff resistance from the American people, they may find out that their side of the war isn't as popular as they'd like to believe. And ironically, their doing so may be the ticket back to the top for Republicans who lead the resistance.

Let's start with Meg Stapleton, one of the few people on Palin's staff who wasn't originally a McCain aide:

Stapleton told ABC News the Fox News report on Africa and NAFTA was taken out of context. She explained that during a briefing session, someone asked Palin to explain the McCain-Palin stance on an issue, and as she was responding, "in the middle, she said 'country of Africa' and somebody instantly wrote it down and said, 'Oh, my God, she thinks it's a country.'"

But "she knows it's a continent," Stapleton said. "It was just a human mistake, just like Obama saying 57 states. I don't think anyone ever doubted that Obama knows there are 50 states."

+++

Regarding the $150,000 worth of clothing, Stapleton claimed it was the campaign that said, "This is what you need as a VP candidate, and it was the campaign and/or the RNC [Republican National Committee] -- but it wasn't the governor -- saying this is what she needs."

Stapleton added that a New York stylist was told to go and make Palin look presidential, that Palin was simply presented with her wardrobe and staff and told, "Here's your people, here are your clothes."

The only items Palin remembers requesting from staff are toothpaste and coats for cold weather, Stapleton said.

Palin even saw a price tag of $3,500 on one suit jacket and said she didn't want to wear it, Stapleton said -- but she was told to wear it anyway.

Stapleton claimed there also was a directive to buy any and all clothes before Sept. 4, the day the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn., ended, so that it could be buried as part of other convention costs.

*

Then we have McCain foreign policy adviser Steve Biegun:

He says there's no way she didn't know Africa was a continent, and whoever is saying she didn't must be distorting "a fumble of words." He talked to her about all manner of issues relating to Africa, from failed states to the Sudan. She was aware from the beginning of the conflict in Darfur, which is followed closely in evangelical churches, and was aware of Clinton's AIDS initiative. That basically makes it impossible that she thought all of Africa was a country.

On not knowing what countries are in NAFTA, Biegun was part of the conversation that led to that accusation and it convinces him "somebody is acting with a high degree of maliciousness." He was briefing Palin before a Univision interview, and talking to her about trade issues. He rolled through NAFTA, CAFTA, and the Colombia FTA. As he talked, people were coming in and out of the room, handing Palin things, etc. She was distracted from what Biegun was saying, and said, roughly, "Ok, who's in NAFTA, what the deal with CAFTA, what's up the FTA?" - her way, Biegun says, of saying "rack them and stack them," begin again from the start. "Somebody is taking a conversation and twisting it maliciously," he says.

More from Biegun and other more general statements of support on the record from Tracey Schmitt here. You can read Randy Scheunemann's defense here. On NAFTA:

Scheunemann suggested the Africa and NAFTA incidents were inaccurate.

"I was not present for all of her sessions, so I can't disprove that," he told ABC News. "I severely doubt that it is accurate. It's certainly not accurate in any of the sessions I had with her."

More here from Scheunemann and Nicolle Wallace defending Palin on the record ("The only thing I've seen her ask for is a diet soda.").

Steve Schmidt:

Steve Schmidt, the campaign's chief strategist, defended Mrs. Palin in an e-mail exchange with The Times concerning, among other articles, a Newsweek report that at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., Mrs. Palin had greeted Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Salter in her hotel room while "wearing nothing but a towel, with another [towel] on her wet hair."

"The towel story categorically is not true," Mr. Schmidt told The Times in the course of telephone and e-mail exchanges over the weekend.

(The Washington Times report has more quotes from people properly noting, in any event, that the informality suggested by that story isn't exactly unusual on the campaign trail).

Charlie Black, on the NAFTA and other specific stories:

"Answer to all of this is no, except she was victim of hoax perpetrated by Canadian talk radio re Sarkozy," Mr. Black said. "Even then, she said nothing wrong in the call. We think she did an excellent job and added a lot to the ticket. 'We' includes John McCain."

And here, of course, is Gov. Palin's own response:

Believe what you want, but in my book when you have multiple named sources standing by specific accounts, and on the other side you have reporters making vague allegations purportedly based on the word of unnamed and unidentifiable sources, the people going on the record and giving specifics have the better argument.

You can watch more of Gov. Palin's most recent press conference back home in Alaska here.

Among those tied to Obama politically, personally, or professionally are:

Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama's presidential campaign and a member of his finance committee. Jarrett is the chief executive of Habitat Co., which managed Grove Parc Plaza from 2001 until this winter and co-managed an even larger subsidized complex in Chicago that was seized by the federal government in 2006, after city inspectors found widespread problems.

+++

Campaign finance records show that six prominent developers - including Jarrett, Davis, and Rezko - collectively contributed more than $175,000 to Obama's campaigns over the last decade and raised hundreds of thousands more from other donors.

+++

Jarrett, a powerful figure in the Chicago development community, agreed to be interviewed but declined to answer questions about Grove Parc, citing what she called a continuing duty to Habitat's former business partners....

Yet again, a reminder that Obama's "new politics" is just a new name for the oldest kind of politics there is.

Most famously, his tome Dead Right proclaimed the intellectual and electoral barrenness of conservatism in general and the GOP in particular, and offered Frum's own prescriptions for the renewals of both. The blurb on the original edition's cover read, "The great conservative revival of the 1980's is over. Government is bigger, taxes are higher, family values are weaker, and the Democrats are in power. What will the Right do next?"

Hilariously, Frum's question was answered a scant two months after the August 1994 publication of Dead Right, when a back-bencher from Georgia led the GOP's takeover of Congress with a majority that lasted for nearly a decade and a half. Along the way they stopped Bill Clinton's wave of tax increases, killed socialized medicine, ended Welfare as a permanent dole, balanced the budget for a couple of years, and later cut taxes under an eight-year Republican administration. They also did plenty of other, less salubrious things, of course, but one can imagine how far Frum's jaw must have dropped when his soothsayings of doom were proven wrong before Dead Right - well reviewed by no less than Frank Rich - had even been remaindered.

Read the whole thing.

Q: What is this story about?

A: In broad outlines, two things. One, the Palin family had a long-running dispute - predating Sarah Palin's campaign for Governor - with Alaska State Trooper Michael Wooten, the ex-husband of Gov. Palin's younger sister Molly. Trooper Wooten remains employed as a State Trooper. Two, in July 2008, Gov. Palin fired Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan, a Cabinet-level employee whose job includes supervising the State Troopers. (Technically, Monegan was demoted, not fired, but the point is that he was removed from his job, and chose to decline the reassignment). The issues are whether Gov. Palin acted improperly in seeking to get Trooper Wooten fired or in firing Monegan.

Q: So, what did the Legislature find?

A. Nothing. As Beldar explains, the Legislature's not in session, so it hasn't done anything, and neither has the 12-member bipartisan Legislative Council under whose authority the investigation was conducted. (As the Anchorage Daily News noted when the Council voted to release his report: "His report was released Friday by a 12-0 vote of the Legislative Council, with eight Republicans and four Democrats voting. Some members of the panel said they didn't agree with Branchflower's findings, however." This despite the axes to grind against Palin by both Republican and Democratic members of the Council) The investigative report by Stephen Branchflower, a retired prosecutor living in South Carolina, is entitled to no more and no less deference than previous determinations by Ken Starr, Robert Ray, Lawrence Walsh, Donald Smaltz, George Mitchell, and other investigative one-man bands. And to the extent that Branchflower shows his own work, you or I are perfectly qualified to second-guess his opinions - and so is Petumenos, the Personnel Board investigator.

Moreover, Branchflower's report is inherently one-sided, as he didn't have access to Gov. Palin, her husband, her sister or a number of other people supportive of the Governor. Obviously, that's due to the battles over the scope and authority of Branchflower's investigation, which in turn were driven by the McCain-Palin camp's justifiable concerns about the fairness of the investigation. Branchflower refused to reference or incorporate the written response by Gov. Palin to the Personnel Board's investigation or the sworn statements of Todd Palin and other witnesses who provided statements late in the game. He also does not appear to have interviewed Trooper Wooten, receiving only a written statement from him. (See Branchflower Report ("BR") 5, 7). But he did find time to interview Democratic Senate candidate Mark Begich, who was actually the first person he interviewed. BR 2. As such, his report should be considered only as one part of the story. Indeed, if you look at his crucial conclusion on page 67 of the report regarding the Palins' concerns about Wooten, Branchflower draws inferences against the Palins while admitting that "in the absence of an interview with either Governor Palin or Todd Palin, the specific answers to [his] questions [about the genuineness of their motives] are left unanswered," then goes about construing the remaining evidence against them on what, as I note below, is a fairly slender foundation. Gov. Palin has, of course, subsequently submitted to an interview that will be part of the conclusions to be drawn after the election by both the Legislature and the Personnel Board, in both of which Gov. Palin obviously has more faith than in Branchflower.

I should also note here that the meandering and repetitive 263-page report is only the public volume. There is also a confidential portion the public can't examine. We can only evaluate Branchflower's public work to see if it supports his conclusions. As discussed below, the public report simply does not purport to address many of the important issues.

Q: Who is Stephen Branchflower?

Branchflower has a longstanding working relationship with Monegan dating to Branchflower's time as a prosecutor in Anchorage, where Monegan was Chief of Police * (as does Branchflower's wife). Likewise, Democratic State Senator Hollis French is "a former prosecutor and colleague of Branchflower". * That's not all that surprising (it's a small law enforcement community), but obviously Branchflower was likely to be predisposed favorably towards Monegan and French, both of whom are aligned against Palin here.

Q: Who is Hollis French and what does he have to do with all this?

Branchflower was handpicked as the investigator by Hollis French (over the objections of the Alaska Attorney General, a Palin ally, who wanted a retired judge or other more objective figure), and French effectively controlled the investigation including the witness list. * (Alaska TV station KTVA describes French as "responsible for managing the case"; the Anchorage Daily News (ADN) calls him the investigation's "project director." *). Here is the basis for concluding that French was running Branchflower's witness list:

Rep. David Guttenberg (D.) asked Branchflower why he was requesting subpoenas for only those people attending the meeting and not Tibbles himself.

Branchflower said he would "have to defer that question to Mr. French."

"I put the list together with, talking to Mr. French," Branchflower added.

Sen. Gene Therriault (R.) told Branchflower, "I don't understand why you would have to defer that question to Sen. French. If it's your list you're in complete control of the list, then why can't you answer the question?"

Branchflower had no explanation. He only offered, "I'm not sure why his name was removed. My initial request was to have him on the list." At that point, French interjected. "It appeared to me there wasn't the political will to subpoena Tibbles."

The Branchflower report was originally designed to be released five days before the election on October 31 but was moved back to October 10 after complaints about the timing. *

Hollis French isn't just a Democratic State Senator on the Legislative Council; as I note below, his de facto alliance with Monegan in the events that led up to Monegan's firing means that he's effectively involved in the facts under investigation, and really ethically should have recused himself from this entire process. But French is also a prominent Obama supporter whose testimonials are featured on Obama's own website * * *, and he had a job to do: provide what he promised would be an "October Surprise" for the McCain-Palin campaign. Speaking to Newsweek in early September, "French ... acknowledged that some of his public comments about the ongoing probe may have been out of bounds. 'I said some things I shouldn't have said'"...

Palin questioned French's impartiality from the time that "French was quoted in The Wall Street Journal [in early August] saying the governor could be impeached as a result of the [Branchflower] probe." (French argued that he'd been misquoted). * Here's how Beldar describes French's conduct:

Democratic state senator Hollis French, who's managing the investigation, is already jumping to conclusions, muttering about "impeachment" to the press, and yet simultaneously he's short-circuited any kind of basic due process by refusing to share with Gov. Palin or her counsel the historical evidence (e.g., emails) that the Legislature's investigator is collecting to use against her! At least one Alaska legislator has already called for French to step down, citing his obvious bias. French has already boasted to ABC News of his desire to "release his final report by Oct. 31, four days before the November election," as an "October surprise" that's "likely to be damaging to the Governor's administration."

John McCormack notes:

Hollis French is now managing the investigation into Monegan's firing, and French has already made partisan remarks about it to the press, saying to the Washington Post: "It undercuts one of the points they are making that [Palin] is an ethical reformer."

Amanda Carpenter notes that some press reports support the notion that Wooten's union, the PSEA (which as discussed below was at loggerheads with Palin in the dispute that precipitated Monegan's demotion) is also coordinating with the Obama campaign:

The same week PSEA filed their complaint, CNN reported that Obama campaign officials had been contacting Wooten's union, although Obama spokesmen have vehemently refuted CNN's report as well as one from the Wall Street Journal's John Fund that said more than 30 lawyers, investigators and opposition researches had been deployed to Alaska to dig up dirt on Palin.

As for Monegan's credibility, certainly Branchflower presents him as a respectable law enforcement figure, and his testimony seems reasonable on its face. That said, he obviously has an axe to grind against Palin. And Monegan himself was once subject to a domestic violence order of protection for making death threats against his now-ex-wife, so he may not be the most unbiased observer of Wooten's situation.

Q: Who is Timothy Petumenos?

I'm not, as yet, as familiar with Petumenos, though I am sure we will learn more about him and the Personnel Board. I assume, given that Gov. Palin submitted her own request for a Personnel Board investigation, that she felt it would be a more sympathetic venue.

UPDATE: Powerline notes that Petumenos is a Democrat who donated money to Palin's opponent, Tony Knowles, in the 2006 election.

Q: OK, that's all well and good, but let's discuss the merits here. Did Gov. Palin act improperly or illegally in firing Walt Monegan?

Branchflower says she had every right to fire Monegan - he exonerates the Governor on the totally obvious ground that she was entitled to fire such a high-ranking officer in her cabinet for any reason or no reason; Monegan serves at the pleasure of the Governor. (See Finding Number Two at p. 69-71 of Branchflower's report). As discussed below, Branchflower's only basis for complaining about Monegan's firing is that he believes that it was partly motivated or precipitated by the dispute over Wooten. In other words, all roads lead back to Wooten.

The evidence shows fairly overwhelmingly that Gov. Palin had legitimate policy-related reasons to want Monegan gone; in her written response to the investigation ("PR"), Gov. Palin refers to these as "good-faith disagreements about appropriate government policy." PR 4(paragraph 16). Monegan was insubordinate; he broke openly with Palin over her efforts to cut his agency's budget, siding instead with Hollis French, of all people, in a budget dispute tied to Palin's Administration's negotiations with the Troopers' union, the PSEA, whose contract was due up in June 2008:

* 12/9/07: Monegan holds a press conference with Hollis French to push his own budget plan.

* 1/29/08: Palin's staffers have to rework their procedures to keep Monegan from bypassing normal channels for budget requests.

* February 2008: Monegan publicly releases a letter he wrote to Palin supporting a project she vetoed.

* June 26, 2008: Monegan bypassed the governor's office entirely and contacted Alaska's Congressional delegation to gain funding for a project.

Allahpundit has explained the latter, an example of Palin in early July 2008 trying to put her foot down to stop a lobbying trip to DC planned by Monegan and Monegan disobeying her:

In a July 7 e-mail, John Katz, the governor's special counsel, noted two problems with the trip: The governor hadn't agreed the money should be sought, and the request was "out of sequence with our other appropriations requests and could put a strain on the evolving relationship between the Governor and Sen. (Ted) Stevens."

Four days later, Monegan was fired. He said he had kept others in the administration fully apprised of his plans to go to Washington.

Consider how even Andrew Halcro - a 2006 Gubernatorial candidate defeated by Palin and now the blogger who started this whole kerfuffle, and thus a person most ill-disposed towards Sarah Palin - described the budget battle:

the Palin administration wanted Monegan to go in another direction. They wanted him to cut corners on a budget that had already fallen behind over the last decade. Under Former Governor Murkwoski there was significant investment made to try and catch up with growing costs but Palin's budgets have again started to starve the agency.

To make matters worse, the change to the state's retirement benefit program adopted by the legislature in 2004 has had a negative effect on the departments ability to recruit new Troopers.

+++

Monegan and his department were getting too far out in front of Palin, acting in ways that were independent and contrary to the governor's wishes. Palin needed to replace Monegan with someone who would be seen but not heard while doing the governor's bidding.

+++

Walt Monegan was fired because he fought too hard. Governor Palin fired Monegan because she understood too little and wanted a puppet as commissioner.

Regardless of whose side you took in the budget battle, the fact is, taking public sides against your boss' budget decisions is very close to the top of the list of ways to get yourself fired in politics. There's simply no way to gloss over the differences of policy and politics that led Monegan to get demoted. Branchflower really had no choice but to find that demoting Monegan was a legitimate exercise of Gov. Palin's authority.

Petumenos concurs that there was no impropriety in demoting/reassigning Monegan.

Q: So, if Gov. Palin had legitimate reasons to fire Monegan, what on earth is Branchflower complaining about?

It's all about Wooten.

Branchflower found that Gov. Palin "abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act," which provides:

The legislature reaffirms that each public officer holds office as a public trust, and any effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action is a violation of that trust.

It's undisputed that Gov. Palin did nothing to act in her financial interest, so the question is whether she acted to benefit a "personal" interest. As noted above, it's undisputed as well that she had other legitimate reasons to remove Monegan, and no personal interest in doing so.

But let's assume for the sake of argument that the strongest case against Gov. Palin is true: that she pressured Monegan to fire Wooten, and that the degree of the pressure to fire Wooten is illustrated by the removal of Monegan from his position when he wouldn't do it himself. (This involves multiple leaps over gaps in Branchflower's evidence, but we'll go there for now for the sake of argument. I'm also glossing here over Branchflower's confused legal definition of what state of mind is required to "knowingly" violate the Ethics Act, although I would argue as well that as a legal matter, Branchflower really has no basis to argue that Gov. Palin "kn[e]w that ... her conduct [was] in violation of the Act," BR 51).

Branchflower's theory is that firing Wooten would be a "personal benefit" to Gov. Palin because it would benefit Gov. Palin's father and sister and that she wanted "to get Trooper Wooten fired for personal family reasons." BR 65, 67. Now, as a legal matter, Palin's lawyers note that there's pretty much no precedent in Alaska law for finding a violation of this provision of the Ethics Act in the absence of any financial interest. And of course in a material sense, as noted below, it's hard to see how getting him fired would benefit his ex-wife.

That said, obviously it's not hard to see why in the aftermath of a bitter divorce, and with child custody issues still open to revisiting, one could see a benefit to Gov. Palin's sister to ruining Wooten. Branchflower has no evidence of this, as a result of which it's improper for him as an officer of the State to jump to that conclusion, but leave that aside for now. The fact is, "personal interest" is at best vaguely defined (Beldar suggests as an example that it could possibly include such things as pardoning someone who could incriminate a governor).

Here is Palin's lawyers' argument in response:

To the extent the Governor is alleged to have sought a non-financial personal benefit from an attempt to have Mr. Wooten dismissed, that benefit would have been a benefit shared generally with the public -- namely, the benefit of a trooper force free from rogue officers who have been found guilty of acts of violence and recklessness against the public. The Ethics Act specifically permits state officials to act in such circumstances, and thus even if the allegations were true -- which they assuredly are not -- there would be not probable cause to pursue the claim in this matter.

Beldar has his own take on what a "personal interest" is (he notes that "Branchflower reads the Ethics Act to prohibit any governmental action or decision made for justifiable reasons benefiting the State if that action or decision might also make a public official happy for any other reason," which I suppose might be a useful rule where you have a clear-cut benefit like a financial interest), as does Paul Mirengoff.

Petumenos, at pp. 17-19, essentially agrees with the Governor's lawyers, and specifically notes that it would be problematic to construe the statute as broadly as Branchflower does - apparently without precedent in Alaska law - in a way that would act as a positive constraint against a Governor acting in the best interests of the public on a matter in which she has no concrete interest similar to a financial interest.

My own view is much the same: acting to get rid of a trooper who is a hazard both to the public and to the State Treasury (through the risk of lawsuits against the State if he misbehaved) is not just a defensible use of the Governor's authority, it's her job. It's illogical to find a significant ethical violation - as required by the precedents cited by Gov. Palin's attorneys - if the Governor reasonably and sincerely believed she was acting in the best interests of the people she was elected to represent. The Governor is, after all, the state's Chief Executive, with sole and really irreplaceable responsibility for public safety and the public fisc. If she had information causing her to believe that one of her subordinates represented a threat to public safety, there's really no good reason why she should have been precluded from doing everything in her power to remove that threat (this is especially true in a small state where people are more apt to know each other).

I just don't see how a legal prohibition on Gov. Palin acting for a "personal interest" - where she had no financial interest at stake - could be triggered if she reasonably and sincerely believed she was acting in the best interests of the public in the case of a trooper who was a menace to society. The fact is that if it is shown that she reasonably and sincerely thought that Wooten should not be a trooper, the benefit of removing him from that position would not be significantly greater for her - as the sister of his estranged and presumably embittered ex-wife - than for the average citizen. There should only be any sort of ethics complaint here if there's a reasonable basis for finding that her concerns about Wooten were pretextual and not supported by a reasonable and sincere desire to protect the public interest, in which case the personal aminus becomes a more significant element in the decisional matrix. As I discuss below, Branchflower does not come close to meeting that standard.

Q: Did Gov. Palin pressure Monegan to take action against Trooper Wooten?

Branchflower dedicates the bulk of his investigation to this question. As to Gov. Palin personally, the evidence suggests that while she repeatedly made clear to Monegan her grievances with Wooten as a trooper, she (1) never directly or indirectly instructed Monegan to fire Wooten and (2) took to heart Wooten's admonition early in her term that for legal reasons she should not talk directly to Monegan about Wooten.

On the first point, Monegan has been unequivocal:

"For the record, no one ever said fire Wooten. Not the governor. Not Todd. Not any of the other staff," Monegan said ... "What they said directly was more along the lines of 'This isn't a person that we would want to be representing our state troopers.'"

Now, Monegan admits that he was never asked to fire Wooten. He also admits that after he advised Gov. Palin early in her term (February 2007) that it would be unwise to discuss the employment of a particular trooper with him, she did not raise the issue again.

That said, and for today at least I'm skimming over some of the details here that were covered exhaustively in the reports, basically the investigators' conclusions turned on Todd Palin and some of the Governor's key staffers constantly pestering Monegan about what a bad trooper Wooten was.

The argument as to why this was improper is, mainly, that Monegan really couldn't fire Wooten - apparently, under the collective bargaining agreement (and possibly state law as well, I'm writing quickly here and can't recall offhand) since he'd already been investigated and given a slap on the wrist, there was no way to reopen his case.

Of course, (1) the Governor can change the law and (2) the collective bargaining agreement was open to renegotiation - it expired in June 2008. That's not to say in either case that Gov. Palin had imperial power to just rewrite the civil-service laws, but it's worth remembering that the rules here were not cast in stone forevermore, and in fact the example of how Wooten got away with the things he had done seems to have stuck in Gov. Palin's craw as an example of why she should be reconsidering the supervision of the troopers.

Q: Did Gov. Palin reasonably and sincerely believe that Trooper Wooten should not be a State Trooper?

I believe the evidence shows rather compellingly that Trooper Wooten's conduct, and specifically the conduct that the Palins complained about, demonstrates his unfitness to serve as a State Trooper and that his continuance in that position presented a risk to public safety as well as a liability risk to the State of Alaska. The record clearly supports that both Gov. Palin and her husband believed this to be true. Thus, to challenge the Palin family's complaints about Trooper Wooten, her critics must argue that Trooper Wooten is a good person to have exercising armed authority on behalf of the State, or, alternatively, that the Governor should not have done anything about him even though he was a menace.

And it's not just limited to dangers to the public. The evidence is also quite clear that Gov. Palin was concerned, repeatedly, about the possibility that Wooten could do something to a member of the Alaskan public that would open the State to the threat of a big-dollar lawsuit, a concern apparently triggered by public reports about other troopers whose conduct led to such judgments during the time period in question. If you know anything about litigation, you know that if the State continued to employ Wooten after the Governor herself knew that he was a 'ticking time bomb,' that would present elevated risks of a massive damages award in the hands of a skilled trial lawyer. New Governors are not required to check at the door the things they have learned in life outside government; there would be no way in such a lawsuit to keep it from coming out that the state's chief executive knew of an extensive history of Wooten's misconduct that rendered him unfit to carry a gun and a badge.

Consider Monegan's comments to the Washington Post, which support the conclusion that Gov. Palin was concerned that Wooten was a symptom of larger problems with the State Troopers that could lead to harm to the State:

Monegan said Palin mostly backed off, but kept raising the matter indirectly through e-mails. In the fall of 2007, Monegan said he alerted her to a bad jury verdict against a trooper in rural Alaska, and she replied by mentioning Wooten, but not by name.

"She said troopers like this one and my former brother-in-law, or that trooper I used to be related to, are the things that make people not trust troopers," Monegan told The Post yesterday.

Mike Gravel, who surely has no particular motive to side with Palin, thinks this is plenty of reason to want the man off the force:

This trooper should have been fired ... if the unions didn't want to step up to the plate. ...

This is a guy that shouldn't be wearing a badge, not when he threatens people's lives. ...

Did they have to wait 'til he killed somebody before they got rid of him?

Certainly Todd Palin is utterly unapologetic about the hazard posed by Trooper Wooten:

"We had a lot of conversations about a guy who threatened my family and verbally assaulted my daughter. We talked about my concerns. We talked about Wooten possibly pulling over one of my kids to frame them, like throwing a bag of dope in the back seat just to frame a Palin," he said of his conversations with one Palin aide.

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"I make no apologies for wanting to protect my family and wanting to publicize the injustice of a violent trooper keeping his badge and abusing the worker compensation system. The real investigation that needs to be conducted for the best interests of the public at large is the Department of Public Safety's unwillingness to discipline its own."

*

As I said, I have not had time to synthesize in a post all of the evidence here. Let's note the big one. In February 2005, as the marital dispute between Mike Wooten and Molly McCann was escalating, Sarah Palin (then a private citizen) was called by her sister to listen in on a big argument between Wooten and his wife (Palin noted in an August 2005 email that this particular altercation was precipitated by the revelation that Wooten had been cheating on his wife). Fearing for her safety in a heated argument, Molly called her older sister Sarah "in case I do need help," and Sarah stayed on one open line and had her son Track listen in with her. You can read the State Trooper investigator's interview 2 months later with Sarah Palin here (I'd block-quote at greater length but I can't copy and paste from these PDFs) - what they heard was chilling, and I wonder how Democrats can read her witness statement and take sides with Wooten as he storms in yelling at his wife in a rage (Palin notes that he's a very big guy, towering over his wife, and was likely wearing his service revolver) and tells her, "If your dad helps you through this divorce, if he gets an attorney he's gonna, he's gonna eat an F'n lead bullet. I'm gonna shoot him." and "I know people in all the right places, in high places. I know judges. I know attorney's [sic]. I have relationships with these guys. You guys are all going down." Palin got concerned enough that she had Track call Molly's neighbor, and Palin drove over to their house herself, eventually leaving when Wooten seemed to have calmed down. Palin noted in an August email the history of Wooten's "physical abuse of his wife." On April 11, 2005, Molly obtained a Domestic Violence Protective Order against Wooten.

Just for one example out of many, this, which also comes from an April 2005 report originating with Molly and Chuck Heath, should give a flavor of Wooten's menace:

Page also relayed that Inv. Wooten may be taking some kind of steroid supplement and having problems with alcohol and relayed a story where (nv. Wooten drove while intoxicated from the Mug Shot Saloon. Page said he had encouraged Molly and Heath to report this behavior to the troopers but they are scared. Page has personally observed Jnv.Wooten's behavior change over the last few months and described him as "disconnected."

+++

Mike has also told Molly that he is taking a testosterone supplement that is illegal. He gets the substance from a friend he weight lifts with whose name she does not know. She cannot recall the name of the substance, just that it has a three letter initial name like MTD, and comes in small, blue pills.

(That's aside from the drinking and driving angle in that particular report).

So far as I can tell, nobody but Wooten himself seriously disputes that Wooten made the threats in question. Wooten "told troopers he never said anything like that about his father-in-law," but the state troopers' investigation did not find in his favor on the facts, concluding only as follows:

Molly McCann, Sarah Palin and Track Palin allege that on February 17, 2005, Investigator Wooten made a comment to Molly McCann that he would shoot her father if he hired a Iawyer for her. McCann advised that Investigator Wooten made this comment to her, and that Sarah and Track Palin who were listening over an open telephone line overheard it. Investigator Wooten was questioned about the comment and denied ever making the statement. Although McCann, Sarah Palin and Track Palin all recalled hearing the statement, a statement 'or implied threat to a non-present third party is not a crime. Although McCann and Sarah Palin felt that their father's life was in danger by the statement, neither mentioned the threat to their father for several weeks. Nevertheless, a statement of this sort by a trooper reflects badly on [Alaska State Troopers].

Newsweek cites subsequent comments by the divorce court judge asking Palin and her family to cool the jets on their complaints about Wooten and eventually dissolving the domestic violence protective order, but those are steps, as Beldar notes, that are fairly common for a divorce court looking to put the family dispute behind everyone, and they don't really address whether the death threats are consistent with believing that Wooten is a menace to public order as a State Trooper. Certainly the Washington Post's characterization of his remarks suggests a concern for something other than getting to the bottom of whether Wooten was a bad Trooper:

Anchorage Superior Court Judge John Suddock reviewed the complaints filed by Palin and her family. At trial on Oct. 27, 2005, the judge expressed puzzlement about why the family was trying to get Wooten fired, since depriving the trooper of a job would harm his ability to pay family support to Palin's sister.

"It appears for the world that Ms. McCann and her family have decided to take off for the guy's livelihood -- that the bitterness of whatever who did what to whom has overridden good judgment," Suddock said in an audio recording from the trial on TV station KTUU's Web site. "Aesop told us not to slay the goose who lays the golden egg. For whatever reason, people are trying to slay the goose here and it tends to diminish his earning capacity."

(See also BR 53-54). Branchflower mainly concluded that concerns over Wooten must be pretextual because the Palins dispensed with much of their security detail...but that's a logical non-sequitur; you could believe that Wooten is a dangerous guy with a hair-trigger temper who has no business in law enforcement and still not think he would hunt down and kill the governor of the state. At the same time, Branchflower's report makes clear that Gov. Palin expressed not wanting to have Wooten at events she was attending.

There's a whole bunch of other problems with Wooten I lack the time here to fully explore (including a number of findings against him by a state police internal investigation) - some minor, some more serious, but collectively giving the impression of a guy who drank too much, was very confident that he was above the law, and had little respect for rules - a bad combination indeed. The most notorious is the time he Tasered his 10-year-old stepson (he "offered" to do the same to Palin's daughter Bristol, who witnessed this lunacy). Wooten himself - who has been married four times - tries to minimize the Taser incident but nonetheless admits it was terrible judgment:

He said that he was a new Taser instructor, and his stepson was asking him about the equipment. "I didn't shoot him with live, you know, actual live cartridge," Wooten said.

Instead, he said, he hooked his stepson up to a training aid "with little clips. And, you know, the Taser was activated for less than a second, which would be less than what you would get if you touched an electric fence. ... It was as safe as I could possibly make it."

He said his stepson was on the living room floor surrounded by pillows, that he "was bragging about it," and that the family laughed about it.

Asked whether it was a dumb decision, Wooten told CNN, "absolutely."

This is a guy the state was supposed to trust with deadly force?

Q: What did Petumenos find?

Here's his summary of findings:

1. There is no probable cause to believe that Governor Palin violated the Alaska Executive Ethics Act by making the decision to dismiss Department of Public Safety Commissioner Monegan and offering him instead the position of Director of the Alaska Beverage Control Board.

2. There is no probable cause to believe that Governor Palin violated the Alaska Executive Ethics Act in any other respect in connection with the employment of Alaska State Trooper Michael Wooten.

3. There is no basis upon which to refer the conduct of Governor Palin to any law enforcement agency in connection with this matter because Governor Palin did not commit the offenses of Interference with Official Proceedings or Official Misconduct.

4. There is no probable cause to believe that any other official of state government violated any substantive provision of the Ethics Act.

5. There is no legal basis or jurisdiction for conducting a "Due Process Hearing to Address Reputational Harm" as requested by former Commissioner Walter Monegan.

6. The Amended Complaint by the PSEA should be dismissed.

7. Independent Counsel recommends that the appropriate agency of State government address the issue of the private use of e-mails for government work and revisit the record retention policies of the Governor's Office.

These findings differ from those of the Branchflower Report because Independent Counsel has concluded the wrong statute was used as a basis for the conclusions contained in the Branchflower Report, the Branchflower report misconstrued the available evidence and did not consider or obtain all of the material evidence that is required to properly reach findings.

We can pick over as we go the debates about the details here, but the argument that there's somehow a formal and uncontested finding that Gov. Palin acted unethically is now unsupportable.

MORE READING: The
McCain-Palin campaign's August 30, 2008 press release makes many of the same points addressed above. * (You can get the graphic version here). And H/T Flopping Aces for some of the links in this post.

Perhaps the most tangible sign of victory in Iraq is the removal of the security walls in Baghdad; one would have to be positively churlish towards the war effort to resist being moved by the sight of those walls coming down, and what they mean to life in the Iraqi capital. And it's not just walls of concrete crumbling as the counterinsurgency "surge" pays its dividends:

On Oct. 1, the Sunni-dominated Awakening movement, widely credited with helping restore order to neighborhoods that were among the most deadly, passed from the American to the Iraqi government payroll in Baghdad. There is deep mutual mistrust between the new employer and many of its new employees, many of whom are former insurgents.

Another element of the transition, which has attracted far less notice than the Awakening transfer, is the effort by the Iraqi Army to begin turning over neighborhoods to the paramilitary National Police. In the future, its officers, too, will leave and be replaced by regular police officers.

At a macro level, only 5 of Iraq's 18 provinces have yet to have full control handed back to Iraqi authorities, although U.S. efforts are still important in securing Iraq's borders.

Have we gone so far along the path to victory that even Barack Obama couldn't screw it up? Not so fast:

U.S. commanders are also worried that security could worsen if the Iraqi parliament refuses to approve a new security agreement by the end of December, when the U.N. Security Council mandate under which the coalition operates in Iraq expires.

Without a new agreement or a new U.N. mandate, U.S. military operations would have to stop. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government is pressing for changes in the draft agreement before submitting it to parliament.

December, of course, is still on George W. Bush's watch, but nobody doubts that the President-elect will have real influence on that process, let alone on the U.S. military's ability to keep faith with our allies in Iraq going forward. But while an Obama Administration may still present a threat to victory in Iraq, the declining public interest in the conflict and the prominence of economic issues at home has basically made it politically impossible to make the case against Obama's wartime leadership, even as he plainly and inarguably got one of the two most important decisions of his time in the U.S. Senate - his opposition to the surge - as wrong as possible (on the other, preventing the financial crisis, he did no better).

Republicans in the 1990s tasted the bitter fruit of electoral irrelevance of one issue after another on which conservative policies had been implemented and succeeded - the Cold War, crime, welfare. (The Democrats don't have this problem). If John McCain loses, it may be because he really did prefer losing an election to losing a war. Certainly many Iraqis would prefer to see McCain win. It will be too bad if American voters don't see things the same way.

At the end of it all, there remain only three arguments for voting Obama that are not built entirely on willful ignorance or willful deceit regarding his record:

(1) The partisan argument: if you are determined to vote for a Democrat, any Democrat, Obama fits the bill. He's a member of the Democratic Party.

(2) The ideological argument: if you really and truly want to see the left wing take over, then the argument for voting Obama is basically the same as the argument for voting for Howard Dean or Dennis Kucinich. He will, in fact, move the government to the left as much as he is able to do.

(3) The race argument: if you think the nation ought to vote for Obama because of the color of his skin, well, you're going to vote for Obama no matter what. (I disagree with Moe Lane's reading of this WaPo profile of an Obama supporter - I think the really distressing thing is her apparent sole fixation on Obama's race. But if, as Moe argues, that also renders her vulnerable to being used for Obama's political purposes, well, there's that too). This should not be confused with the argument that Obama would somehow be good for race relations as a whole in this country; to the contrary, the relentless effort by Obama and his supporters to play the race card against any and all criticism is a difficult instinct to turn off once it is activated, and is almost certain to have a corrosive effect over the next four years. Remember, people once thought electing David Dinkins would be good for race relations in New York City, too.

But that's pretty much it. Everything else that's been trotted out as a basis for voting Obama requires a willing suspension of disbelief. Instead, we get compelling political arguments like this one:

H/T. This too.

I'm not convinced that Obama's going to win. I'm convinced that he's significantly more likely than not to win, but of course by now we've all been through the reasons to question the polls, and for McCain supporters to refuse to submit to media efforts to declare the race over. But win or lose, certainly the GOP will need to do some serious thinking about how we got to the pass in which a candidate like Obama became thinkable, in which the illusions on which his candidacy has been based have never really been effectively punctured. In the event of defeat, certainly there will be much fun to be had exploiting the gulf between the Obama of his record and the Obama of his image, as it will be impossible for him to govern as both even if he is able to summon the executive competence and fortitude that he has never in his life had reason to display. But the nation should never have had to contemplate being punished with an Obama Presidency.

The text of the speech is here, and while the precise challenges of the present day have changed, so many of the principles Reagan talked about then (especially the segment on the soft, slow slide towards socialism starting around 18:20) is still vital to today's election.

Notice three things. One, this predates the happy-warrior Reagan - he's tough and uncompromising. Two, you won't get lost in a fog of generalities - Reagan was pithy and philosophical, but as always he also came loaded for bear with statistics and specifics to back up his points. And three, I had seen clips of that speech before but this is the first one that showed the crowd.

It's instructive to compare Reagan's stark choices to Obama's "Closing Argument" speech on Monday in Ohio. There's a bunch of interesting and telling tropes in that speech, but just to touch on two of them - the speech may as well have been entitled "A Time For Not Choosing," because a core theme speech was the idea that hard tradeoffs are, in fact, not really tradeoffs at all:

We don't have to choose between allowing our financial system to collapse and spending billions of taxpayer dollars to bail out Wall Street banks.

The choice in this election isn't between tax cuts and no tax cuts. It's about whether you believe we should only reward wealth, or whether we should also reward the work and workers who create it....

When it comes to jobs, the choice in this election is not between putting up a wall around America or allowing every job to disappear overseas. ...

When it comes to health care, we don't have to choose between a government-run health care system and the unaffordable one we have now. If you already have health insurance, the only thing that will change under my plan is that we will lower premiums....

When it comes to giving every child a world-class education so they can compete in this global economy for the jobs of the 21st century, the choice is not between more money and more reform - because our schools need both....

And when it comes to keeping this country safe, we don't have to choose between retreating from the world and fighting a war without end in Iraq....

Both Reagan and Obama do a play on the "this is not right vs. left" argument, but Reagan argued that "left" is really "down" to a socialist future, while "right" means America's traditional liberties:

You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down--up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order--or down to the ant heap totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.

Obama, by contrast, does the same thing - but while Reagan insisted, into the teeth of an electoral disaster, that his ideas could stand the test of history, Obama uses the "no left, no right" meme to disguise his Great Society big-government liberalism behind an updated version of Michael Dukakis' "competence, not ideology" slogan:

Understand, if we want get through this crisis, we need to get beyond the old ideological debates and divides between left and right. We don't need bigger government or smaller government. We need a better government - a more competent government - a government that upholds the values we hold in common as Americans.

Not exactly the words of a man confident that he can openly proclaim a "progressive" ideology and survive. To the very end, Obama will refuse to admit what it is that he is selling. A time for choosing, indeed.

I was a grudging supporter of the Paulson Plan (a/k/a the "Wall Street bailout") on the theory that it was absolutely necessary at the time as a policy matter to restore confidence and liquidity in the financial markets, which have ripple effects for pretty much the entire rest of the world economy. One of the main policy arguments in favor of the Paulson Plan was that it was relatively minimalist and not really going to be a long-term money-loser for the government. One of the sounder political arguments against the plan was that casting it as a "bailout" of the unpopular financial industry would lead to a long procession of pretty much everybody else coming to Washington to ask to be bailed out of whatever was ailing them, at large expense and without any analogous hope that the taxpayers would get their money back. This has come to pass quickly, and the Rangel proposal is its reductio ad absurdum. Consider:

Q: Why Does New York State Need A Bailout?

A: Because it can't pay its bills.

Q: If New York Does Not Cut Spending or Get A Bailout, How Will It Pay Its Bills?

A: Raise state/local taxes on New York taxpayers.

Q: So, Who Will Pay New York's Bills If There Is A Bailout?

A: Federal taxpayers.

Q: Aren't Those The Same People?

A: Basically, yes. If states and cities aren't bailed out in equal proportion to the tax money they send Washington, then it's not precisely the same, it's a "spread the wealth" transfer. So it's possible that New York will get to soak the taxpayers of some other state, especially with Rangel chairing the committee; then again, the high cost of living in NY means that the state's taxpayers generally pay a high per-capita share of federal taxes and will pay a much larger share if Obama gets in and passes his tax plan. But in the aggregate, the burdens of state and local taxpayers are being relieved by ... those same taxpayers' federal tax dollars.

Q: What Is The Purpose Of This Shell Game?

To diffuse responsibility. If Gov. Paterson or Mayor Bloomberg raises taxes or cuts spending, they take the blame. But if the same dollars get laundered through the colossal federal budget, it's easier for the impact to get lost. The purpose is thus to ensure that taxpayers do not directly see where the money is coming from, and get to imagine that somebody else is paying it.

Of course, they could consider cutting spending. Presumably Gov. Paterson is asking for help because he has wholly eliminated non-essential spending from the New York State Government, right?

Obviously the other way to do this is, have the federal government use borrowed money, since the feds can borrow at a lower rate and with fewer state-law restrictions on borrowing. But the accountability point stands. Politicians should not spend money they can't afford to raise from their own constituents.

A. Honor

(1) McCain The Faithful Warrior

John McCain is a professional soldier by birth, upbringing and career. We have had war-hero candidates in several recent elections - George H.W. Bush, John Kerry, Bob Dole - but these men were fundamentally citizen soldiers, men who left behind the world they grew up in to meet their country's call of duty. They were men who were asked to be heroes and discovered that they had it in them. John McCain was raised to be a hero.

That doesn't make the professional soldier more or less noble than the citizen soldier; for most of our nation's history, we have depended upon the ability to meld professional warfighters with citizen soldiers to create an armed force that greater than the sum of its parts. It just means that we have to remember that McCain's internal code of conduct is much more expressly military - a code that places honor, the keeping of one's word and one's loyalty to country and comrades above all else and against all perils.

I won't recount here in any detail the most famous of all McCain stories, his refusal to accept early release as a POW in Vietnam, at the cost of solitary confinement and torture that left him with permanent injuries. But recall that what McCain was doing in that episode was all about the POWs' code of conduct and code of honor. McCain saw the other men around him suffer greatly for that code of honor, and he refused to betray them by betraying it. Indeed, when McCain speaks even to this day about the episode in which he finally broke one night under torture and signed a false confession, you can hear in his voice that he has never forgiven himself even for that moment of wholly understandable weakness. But when morning came, he still refused to go home. He established then and there that when McCain perceives that an issue of his honor is at stake, he will not yield no matter what he must suffer.

(2) McCain The Unfaithful Husband

McCain's code of honor does not, unfortunately, extend to every aspect of his life; most famously, he failed at what most of us regard as the most solemn vow a man can take. His first marriage collapsed in the late 1970s due principally to McCain's serial infidelity to his first wife, who like McCain had suffered serious injuries during his imprisonment, in her case in a car accident. Under all the circumstances - their long time apart, the hardships of war, the burdens of their physical disabilities - we may find it understandable that the marriage fell apart; but that doesn't in any way justify McCain in cheating on his wife and eventually leaving her to marry a younger, healthier, wealthier woman.

It's beyond the time and space I have available here to fully explore the relevance to a public official's career of purely private sins such as marital infidelity. I would briefly digress to suggest the following points, and apply them to McCain:

First, character does matter, and matters more for executives than for legislators due to the nature of the job and the broad discretion executives enjoy. Elections are never just about "the issues," given the broad range of unforeseen circumstances that can arise and given the serious questions voters must always ask about whether a candidate will keep his or her promises on the issues. That's why I'm writing this series, after all. I never bought the argument made by the Democrats throughout the 1990s that character is wholly irrelevant.

Second, private character is not irrelevant. We know that private problems can become public ones if, for example, a philanderer has an affair with, or sexually harrasses, a subordinate employee (Clinton, Foley), gets busted for hiring prostitutes or soliciting sex (Spitzer, Craig), puts unqualified lovers on the public payroll (McGreevey) or has to negotiate or regulate public business with an ex-mistress (Corzine, Frank). While it is true that men will do things for sex they might not do for other temptations, the weakness of character still tells us something about the man, and I am not at all convinced that strength of character can be so subdivided as to make private failings irrelevant to predicting public behavior. (This is aside from issues of deceit and recklessness involved when a public official dares the press to catch him when he knows he's guilty (Hart), chases skirts after he has been caught before (Clinton), engages in illegal activities to cover up an affair (Clinton) or lies directly to the public, to his supporters and to his closest aides (Clinton, Edwards)). Finally, a man with private sins may feel unduly and improperly constrained by his own glass house, and may let the fear of a hypocrisy charge frighten him away from standing up for virtue when it is appropriate or necessary to do so.

Third, however, character is not a series of yes/no questions. It is the test of the whole man, and the test of a lifetime. We understand that all our leaders have sins. Some are more serious than others (surely, marital infidelity is one of those), and some are more recent and current than others, but we are well-advised to judge the whole man, the whole record. A 24-year-old DUI conviction did so much damage to George W. Bush in the week before the 2000 election because, relatively speaking, he did not have a long, countervailing record of positive proof of his character when he ran for president. The same is true of rookie candidates like Obama and Edwards and Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin - having less by which to judge them, each incident and each failing grows larger in proportion. And a character flaw becomes more serious when it reinforces negative impressions about a candidate's public career. For conservatives, at least, Bill Clinton's serial infidelity and pervasive dishonesty about the matter was troublesome because it was so completely consistent with the public Clinton.

McCain comes to us with an exceptionally long public career and many, many incidents that have called upon him to show us his character and what he has made of. He has passed many tests, sometimes tests few living men have been exposed to. He has taken many stands. He is, in short, the ultimate known quantity; he is not going to be anyone in office but the John McCain we already know so well. Nor is there any real fear that McCain will get himself into similar messes in office - this is 30 years ago, and he's been happily and steadily married ever since. He is, frankly, 72 years old; he's not 42 anymore.

Do we see patterns of McCain's infidelity in his public life? Well, I suppose you could argue that we have, in the sense that he's been less than faithful to the Republican party over the years. As you can see from the examples I cite below, McCain obviously does not see loyalty to political ideas or institutions as covered by his code of honor, and so he can be tempted away from his loyalty to them. But on the fundamental question of whether the government should serve the general public interest or more narrow interests - even when those interests are the interests of large or influential groups - and on those issues, such as national security, that he plainly regards as matters of honor, McCain's military code of honor does, in fact, compel him to take stand after stand by the light of his conscience even when it's not obviously in his own best interests. We can trust him to do the same in office because we have been watching him do it all these years.

B. The Keating Five

I referred previously to Sarah Palin as an unlikely source for political reform, and in his own way, so is John McCain. Befitting his background, McCain came to Congress as a defense hawk who sought a place on the key national security committees; nothing in his background suggested a guy who would be a leading voice on domestic policy. But you can't really tell the story of John McCain's career as a Washington gadfly of reform without its origins in the "Keating Five" scandal of the late 1980s (McCain's so old even his scandals are ancient). While some of McCain's reformist streak predates the scandal, virtually every account of his career notes that having his honor called into question was the deepest cut McCain could possibly suffer, and one that motivated many of his later forays into cleaning up the ethical morass of Washington as a form of personal redemption.

Here's how the Arizona Republic describes the genesis of the scandal:

It all started in March 1987. Charles H Keating Jr., the flamboyant developer and anti-porn crusader, needed help. The government was poised to seize Lincoln Savings and Loan, a freewheeling subsidiary of Keating's American Continental Corp.

As federal auditors examined Lincoln, Keating was not content to wait and hope for the best. He had spread a lot of money around Washington, and it was time to call in his chits.

One of his first stops was Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz.

The state's senior senator was one of Keating's most loyal friends in Congress, and for good reason. Keating had given thousands of dollars to DeConcini's campaigns. At one point, DeConcini even pushed Keating for ambassador to the Bahamas, where Keating owned a luxurious vacation home.

Now Keating had a job for DeConcini. He wanted him to organize a meeting with regulators to deliver a message: Get off Lincoln's back. Eventually, DeConcini would set up a meeting with five senators and the regulators. One of them was McCain.

+++

Despite his history with Keating, McCain was hesitant about intervening. At that point, he had been in the Senate only three months. DeConcini wanted McCain to fly to San Francisco with him and talk to the regulators. McCain refused.

Keating would not be dissuaded.

On March 24 at 9:30 a.m., Keating went to DeConcini's office and asked him if the meeting with the regulators was on. DeConcini told Keating that McCain was nervous.

"McCain's a wimp," Keating replied... "We'll go talk to him."

Keating had other business on Capitol Hill and did not reach McCain's office until 1:30. A DeConcini staffer already had told McCain about the "wimp" insult.

When he arrived, Keating presented McCain with a laundry list of demands for the regulators.

McCain told Keating that he would attend the meeting and find out whether Keating was getting treated fairly but that was all.

The first meeting, on April 2, 1987, in DeConcini's office, included Ed Gray, chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, as well as four senators: DeConcini, McCain, Alan Cranston, D-Calif., and John Glenn, D-Ohio.

(Years later, McCain recalled that DeConcini started the meeting with a reference to "our friend at Lincoln." McCain characterized it as "an unfortunate choice of words, which Gray would remember and repeat publicly many times.")

For Keating, the meeting was a bust. Gray told the senators that as head of the loan board, he worried about the big picture. He didn't have any specific information about Lincoln. Bank regulators in San Francisco would be versed in that, not him. Gray offered to set up a meeting between the senators and the San Francisco regulators.

The second meeting was April 9. The same four senators attended, along with Sen. Don Riegle, D-Mich. Also at the meeting were William Black, then deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp., James Cirona, president of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and Michael Patriarca, director of agency functions at the FSLIC.

In an interview with The Republic, Black said the meeting was a show of force by Keating, who wanted the senators to pressure the regulators into dropping their case against Lincoln. The thrift was in trouble for violating "direct investment" rules, which prohibited S&Ls from taking large ownership positions in various ventures.

"The Senate is a really small club, like the cliche goes," Black said. "And you really did have one-twentieth of the Senate in one room, called by one guy, who was the biggest crook in the S&L debacle."

Black said the senators could have accomplished their goal "if they had simply had us show up and see this incredible room and said, 'Hi. Charles Keating asked us to meet with you. 'Bye.'"

McCain previously had refused DeConcini's request to meet with the Lincoln auditors themselves. In Worth the Fighting For, McCain wrote that he remained "a little troubled" at the prospect, "but since the chairman of the bank board didn't seem to have a problem with the idea, maybe a discussion with the regulators wouldn't be as problematic as I had earlier thought."

+++

After the meeting, McCain was done with Keating.

"Again, I was troubled by the appearance of the meeting," McCain said later. "I stated I didn't want any special favors from them. I only wanted them (Lincoln Savings) to be fairly treated."

Black doesn't completely buy that argument. If McCain was concerned about Keating asking him to do things that were improper, why go to either meeting at all?

Black said McCain probably went because Keating was close to being the political godfather of Arizona and McCain still had plenty of ambition.

"Keating was incredibly powerful," Black said. "And incredibly useful."

McCain's reservations aside, Keating accomplished his goal. He had bought some time, though the price was very high.

You can read the whole thing for an accounting of McCain's longstanding relationship (financial and political) with Keating and the blow-by-blow of the meeting. The five Senators - four Democrats, including John Glenn, last seen stumping for Obama, and McCain - got reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee under the Democrat-controlled Senate in 1990:

In the end, McCain received only a mild rebuke from the Ethics Committee for exercising "poor judgment" for intervening with the federal regulators on behalf of Keating. Still, he felt tarred by the affair.

"The appearance of it was wrong," McCain said. "It's a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do."

McCain noted that Bennett, the independent counsel, recommended that McCain and Glenn be dropped from the investigation.

"For the first time in history, the Ethics Committee overruled the recommendation of the independent counsel," McCain said.

+++

McCain owns up to his mistake this way:

"I was judged eventually, after three years, of using, quote, poor judgment, and I agree with that assessment."

As Adam Clymer of the New York Times noted in 1995, partisan politics was behind even the tepid reprimand McCain received:

During the Keating Five scandal, committee Democrats resisted dropping the case against John McCain, the Arizona Republican, because that would have left only Democrats accused of improper dealings with Charles Keating, the savings and loan executive.

Basically, McCain's self-assessment is correct: like Glenn, he exercised terrible judgment in associating his good name with Keating, benefitting Keating in his dealings with the regulators. Neither McCain nor Glenn was as culpable in the scandal as DeConcini, Cranston or Riegle - fundamentally, all they really did was show their faces at a meeting - but they were wrong to do even that much. It's a lesson McCain shouldn't have had to learn, but learn he did.

C. The Maverick

We've now assembled the essential picture of John McCain as he stood nearly two decades ago, as a first-term Senator in his mid-50s: war hero who suffered greatly for his code of honor in Hanoi; philanderer who wrecked his first marriage, trying to make better on the second try; legislator tarred by scandal for his association with a crook and burning with a desire to reclaim his reputation for honor. I will freely admit that if McCain had run for President in 1992, at the stage of his career that Obama is at now, he would have had difficulty extricating proof of his honor and integrity from the wreckage of the Keating Five, and would have lacked much in the way of a record. But McCain has walked many miles since then to earn our trust; let us review the portrait that emerges:

(1) Party Disloyalty

The list of issues on which McCain has fought powerful interests inside and outside his own party is too long to recount here. Let us start with McCain the un-party man. For example, Gamecock has rounded up a fairly comprehensive list of McCain's deviations from conservative orthodoxy, including national security issues like interrogation policy. Jonathan Chait has described McCain's apostasies during Bush's first term:

It is no exaggeration to say that, during this crucial period, McCain was the most effective advocate of the Democratic agenda in Washington.

In health care, McCain co-sponsored, with John Edwards and Ted Kennedy, a patients' bill of rights. He joined Chuck Schumer to sponsor one bill allowing the re-importation of prescription drugs and another permitting wider sale of generic alternatives. All these measures were fiercely contested by the health care industry and, consequently, by Bush and the GOP leadership. On the environment, he sponsored with John Kerry a bill raising automobile fuel-efficiency standards and another bill with Joe Lieberman imposing a cap-and-trade regime on carbon emissions. He was also one of six Republicans to vote against drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

McCain teamed with Carl Levin on bills closing down tax shelters, forbidding accounting firms from selling products to the firms they audited, and requiring businesses that gave out stock options as compensation to reveal the cost to their stockholders. These measures were bitterly opposed by big business and faced opposition not only from virtually the whole of the GOP but even from many Democrats as well.

McCain voted against the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts. He co-sponsored bills to close the gun-show loophole, expand AmeriCorps, and federalize airport security. All these things set him against nearly the entire Republican Party.

As Chait recognizes, McCain's stands on these issues is not really about ideology; it's McCain going his own idiosyncratic way. Some of these issues, of course, smell to conservatives like media or populist grandstanding. And as I stressed with Obama, I don't view adherence to principle or party loyalty as bad things, nor do I see deviation from the party line as necessarily good. I'd prefer that the GOP was running a principled conservative. But when we fill in the broader picture of McCain's tilts at Washington windmills, a clearer focus emerges, one that is about more than just what is passingly popular or fashionable. The picture that shows that no exterior influence can wholly explain John McCain's stubborn independence. McCain may tack at times with the wind, but he very frequently steers by his own stars.

(2) Scourge of the Hill

Let's touch on a few more that illustrate specifically my point about McCain's independence from powerful forces in all camps:

-Campaign finance reform, of course, is McCain's most famous signature domestic issue. I've never agreed with McCain's policy precriptions on this issue, nor have most conservatives. But nobody questions the sincerity of his crusading spirit on the issue, nor the price he has paid for it. It's not just that McCain has made lifelong enemies of principled conservative commentators like George Will; he also burned his bridges with the leadership of activist groups like the National Right to Life Committee and the NRA who chafed at the way his restrictions on issue ads interfered with their ability to promote their positions during elections. As a result, McCain to this day faces reactions ranging from indifference to seething opposition among the grassroots leadership on the Right that cuts across issues and blocs. (Indeed, it is quite possible that without Sarah Palin on the GOP ticket and Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee, the NRA would never have endorsed McCain).

-Then there's McCain's years-long battle against pork barrel spending projects, a battle that Tom Coburn has since joined but on which McCain for years led alone. The AP describes the origins:

McCain's crusade started with the line-item veto.

McCain, newly elected to the Senate, jumped aboard an effort by Republican fiscal conservatives to pass a line-item veto giving the president authority to cancel specific provisions - namely, wasteful dollars - without vetoing an entire bill.

A history buff, McCain asked his staff to bone up on the time-honored Washington tradition of tucking money into spending bills for pet projects back home, without any government review of whether the projects are needed. Aides learned the practice, known as earmarking, went back many decades, beginning with boat locks along the country's rivers and lighthouses dotting the coasts.

He also had aides ferret out current-day earmarks, and when he saw the list, McCain was incredulous. He strode to the floor of the Senate to read the list into the Congressional Record, much to the annoyance of colleagues unused to public scrutiny of their pet projects.

Thus began "the scrub," McCain's effort to expose every earmark in every spending bill. They weren't easy to find; earmarks often are added late at night, when the Senate is still in session but when most lawmakers have gone home. McCain stationed aides on the floor to inspect each amendment as it was offered.

In the Senate, an institution where comity and collegiality rule, McCain was not winning popularity contests. His bull-in-a-china-shop tactics ignited a feud with the Appropriations Committee members responsible for most of the earmarks.

The feud simmers to this day. Earlier this year, the senior Republican on the panel, Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran, endorsed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney over McCain. Cochran told The Boston Globe the thought of McCain as president "sends a cold chill down my spine."

As the AP piece notes, and as we have seen on the trail, McCain still has to answer tough questions about his opposition to this or that local project. But he stands his ground - it's who he is.

-McCain opposed President Bush, the GOP Congressional leadership, the pharmaceutical companies and the AARP in opposing the expansion of Medicare to cover prescription drugs, something George Bush and Al Gore had campaigned on in 2000 and which was regarded as universally popular. McCain thought it was fiscally irresponsible, and he was right.

-McCain has battled for years against subsidies and trade barriers that use taxpayer funds to artifically prop up the price of corn ethanol despite serious questions about whether ethanol is a boondoggle as an alternative fuel. There's a reason why ethanol subsidies have such a lock on the political process: would-be presidential candidates must swear fealty to the ethanol lobby if they hope to compete in the crucial Iowa caucuses. McCain, nearly alone among recent presidential candidates (I believe Bill Bradley was an exception) refused to bend on the issue, as a result of which he skipped Iowa in the 2000 primaries, finished third there in 2008, and appears well behind ethanol-backing Barack Obama in this year's general election in Iowa. Remember: ethanol isn't just a moneyed lobby, it's also a popular cause in Iowa. But in this case the people are wrong, and McCain's not afraid to tell them that.

-McCain has likewise stubbornly supported free trade, proudly declaring himself a free trader in this year's debates. As with immigration and his foreign policy views, trade is a core part of McCain's internationalist worldview. He's been unfraid to campaign for it even in NAFTA-hating sectors of Ohio. It's who McCain is.

-As he has noted in a few of the debates, he opposed President Reagan on the use of Marines as peacekeepers in Beruit in 1983, a deployment Reagan later regarded as the worst mistake of his presidency. (Even efforts to spin this as somehow not the case note that "What McCain voted against was a measure to invoke the War Powers Act and to authorize the deployment of U.S. Marines in Lebanon for an additional 18 months. The measure passed 270-161, with 26 other Republicans (including McCain) and 134 Democrats voting against it."). *

-While many of McCain's positions over the years have been popular with the press, in 1999 he cast just about the most unpopular vote, from the media's perspective, in recent Washington history, to remove the President of the United States from office. As he explained at the time, with a nod to the inevitable hypocrisy charge given McCain's own marital history as well as the fact that he would be voting to wound a man who would still be in the White House, sitting atop high approval ratings, for the remaining year and a half of his term (while his primary opponent, George W. Bush, maintained studious silence on the issue), McCain, typically, viewed the vote as a matter of honor:

All of my life, I have been instructed never to swear an oath to my country in vain. In my former profession, those who violated their sworn oath were punished severely and considered outcasts from our society. I do not hold the President to the same standard that I hold military officers to. I hold him to a higher standard. Although I may admit to failures in my private life, I have at all times, and to the best of my ability, kept faith with every oath I have ever sworn to this country. I have known some men who kept that faith at the cost of their lives. I cannot--not in deference to public opinion, or for political considerations, or for the sake of comity and friendship--I cannot agree to expect less from the President.

Most officers of my acquaintance would have resigned their commission had they been discovered violating their oath. The President did not choose that course of action. He has left it to the Senate to determine his fate. And the Senate, as we all know, is going to acquit the President. As much as I would like to, I cannot join in his acquittal.

-McCain then turned around and took a position that was unpopular with his party - to support President Clinton's pursuit of a war in Bosnia following on ths heels of his acquittal - but also angered the White House by calling for more ground troops and for formal Congressional approval of the war. McCain's resolution was shot down by a joint effort of Senate leaders Trent Lott and Tom Daschle. (McCain took a similar middle course on the recent FISA debate, angering the Bush White House by arguing that the issue should be sent to Congress but also angering opponents of the Bush surveillance policy by supporting the effort to enshrine it in law).

-McCain's battles with defense contractors are legendary, including his fight to impose fixed-price contracts and his famous showdown with Boeing:

At stake is a $21 billion contract, of which Boeing, as prime contractor, gets the lion's share. The FCS program is billed by the Pentagon as an "overwhelmingly lethal" weapons system integrating battlefield computers into one vast communications network. It supports 550 workers at Boeing's Kent site and, according to the company, puts roughly $175 million into Washington state's economy each year.

McCain, R-Ariz., has complained that the contract was not structured according to standard procurement procedures, an allegation similar to the one that began the investigation of the tanker deal. The contract does not provide for enough oversight and scrutiny, and gives the companies too much leeway on pricing, he said.

The hearing was packed with defense contractors, their lobbyists and public-relations executives, who were watching it carefully for several reasons.

This session was McCain's first hearing as chairman of the powerful Airland Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee; he has vowed to redo the mammoth military-procurement process, and this was his first step.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, McCain has had trouble attracting support from defense contractors. * * * McCain's battles with defense contractors are a sign of his view, shared by Gov. Palin, that being pro-business doesn't have to mean accepting longstanding deference to the interests of particular businesses.

-Wall Street: Of course, we know about McCain's calls for reform of lobbying powerhouses Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, even during times when they were employing as a lobbyist Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager in 2000 and still a major figure in McCain's current campaign. But McCain also has a fairly long record of dissenting from his party by supporting regulation of the private sector of the financial industry. This, again, is not a stand I agree with, but it is yet another sign of how McCain marches to the beat of his own drum.

-Vietnam: McCain's integrity is also shown by his capacity for forgiveness. In 1996, in conjunction with the Clinton Administration, McCain joined across the aisle with John Kerry to work on normalizing relationships with the regime in Vietnam that tortured him. This wasn't always popular work; families of long-missing POWs often didn't appreciate the conclusions of McCain's and Kerry's work on the POW-MIA issue. But McCain answered the call to move forward rather than dwell on entirely justified grievances.

(3) Taking Names

I referred to this in the last installment - McCain hasn't just been willing to fight for reform, he's been willing to name names and make a lot of enemies to do it. McCain frequently embarrassed individual fellow Senators with his attacks on pork projects, including the now-famous "Bridge to Nowhere." McCain also chaired hearings on the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, despite the damage it did to the GOP's reputation on Capitol Hill. (Here's Salon in 2005 describing one such session). (Tom DeLay still hasn't forgiven him). *

(4) Iraq and Immigration

If you want an illustration of how John McCain's integrity played into his presidential campaign, even at great political risk, look at Iraq and immigration. McCain entered the race in 2007 as the consensus front-runner or co-front-runner for the nomination - the next guy in line, with a national reputation and good standing in the polls. By the late summer of 2007, his campaign was basically dead in the water. His public approval ratings tell the tale:

McCain's crash in 2007 was not the result of the rise of any one opponent, or any new scandal. It was, principally, driven by his decision to lead the fight in the Senate for comprehensive immigration reform, a hugely controversial piece of bipartisan legislation (his co-sponsor was the hated Ted Kennedy) that was massively unpopular with the Republican base. Grassroots activists were up in arms, and pundits branded McCain "McAmnesty." It was practically a textbook example of how to destroy a primary campaign by picking a fight with his party's base. But McCain saw the Senate fight through to the end.

It could be argued, of course, that McCain was playing to the middle and aiming for the general election. After all, Latino voters are an important general election constituency in a number of states. But at the same time that McCain was risking his neck with primary voters over immigration, he was doing the same with the general electorate over what was then the massively unpopular war in Iraq.

We can all well remember how setbacks in the Iraq War in 2006 helped the Democrats capture Congress and emboldened previously waffling candidates like Obama to become full-throated advocates of immediately commencing a withdrawal from Iraq. Many on the Right thought that the main challenge of 2008 would be the unpopularity of the war, and careful observers noted that throughout the spring and summer of 2007, Mitt Romney was leaving himself room to run away from the war effort in time for the general election if it went badly.

Not McCain, whose famous declaration - "I'd rather lose an election than lose a war" - perfectly captured the extent to which the war remained a matter of principle to the old warrior. McCain had been a supporter of the war since the beginning (and an Iraq hawk for a decade before that), but had also repeatedly angered the White House and the Pentagon with his calls for more troops. When the Bush Administration adopted the "surge" strategy that incorporated a short-term increase in troop levels, McCain went all-in on the strategy, banking his campaign on America's success. Had the surge failed, McCain would have been toast in the general election, and probably early enough that it would have cost him the primaries as well. But as on immigration, McCain eschewed the cautious approach and the conventional wisdom in favor of his longstanding principles. That America stands within reach of victory in Iraq is in no small part due to his persistent advocacy of the war and the surge, even when they were especially unpopular with those people - moderates and swing voters disaffected from Bush - who McCain would need to court in the general election. But even when McCain most desperately needed votes, he still put the good of the war effort first. When has Barack Obama done anything like that? When has the moment ever called for anything that Barack Obama delivered?

IV. Joe Biden: Business As Usual

I'm not going to spend much time here on Joe Biden. First of all, nobody's voting on Joe Biden. Second, whatever Biden's intentions and however long his tenure in Washington, there just isn't any point in taking seriously the idea that Biden could be any sort of agent of "change"...let's review:

Biden served in the Senate for most of the 1970s without making a mark as a reformer or exposing any significant corruption.

Biden served in the Senate for all of the 1980s without making a mark as a reformer or exposing any significant corruption.

Biden served in the Senate for all of the 1990s without making a mark as a reformer or exposing any significant corruption.

Biden has served in the Senate for the first nine years of this decade without making a mark as a reformer or exposing any significant corruption.

Oh, and Biden's son is a Washington lobbyist.

None of this makes him a bad guy or a bad Senator. But Biden is practically part of the furniture in the Senate; it's pretty hard to define what "business as usual" in the Senate means if it doesn't include Joe Biden.

V. Conclusion

Anyone who expects their politicians to be saints is in for a lifetime of rude surprises. John McCain and Sarah Palin haven't gotten as far as they have in politics without understanding how to do the things politicians do; you can pick over their records for projects they shouldn't have funded, contributors or endorsers they shouldn't have solicited, lobbyists they shouldn't have hired or worked with, etc. They aren't otherworldly figures descended to this fallen vale of tears to save us from our own vice. Their motives aren't always purely altruistic, and their ideas of reform aren't even always well-advised. And neither, for that matter, is Barack Obama an especially spineless political climber, at least by Chicago standards.

But what matters on the issue of integrity in office on matters of both politics and policy is that both McCain and Palin have been willing to stick their necks out and crack heads to make things happen. Time and again, each of them has stood up against corruption and waste even in their own party, making important and powerful enemies in their own ranks in the process. And Obama has never had the courage to do any of that; he was always, at every turn, happy to take what the machine was there to give him and look the other way, or worse. Obama has his issues he can campaign on, but on the question of integrity, he has nothing at all to offer. Change? Change how Washington politics works - even a little, even gradually, even one grimy hand-to-hand battle at a time? There is no plausible case you could make that Obama's record shows him to be any kind of change agent at all, let alone the kind that McCain and Palin have proven themselves to be. If Obama tries to change Washington, it will only be to aggrandize his own power and that of his party.

As I always say, in politics you judge a man's vices by the friends he keeps and his virtues by the enemies he makes. McCain and Palin have made enemies worth having. But all around him, all through his career, any enemy worth making has ended up instead as one of Obama's friends.

Nor is there any particular proposal for preventing that institution from falling prey to the same forces that grip the regulated industry. I have said it before, but it is worth repeating: the regulators became overconfident in the same way, and for the same reasons, that the bankers became overconfident. Just as a long and unusually rosy period in the housing market convinced the bankers that they had gotten better at pricing credit risk, a long period without a large bank failure persuaded the regulators that they had gotten better at regulation. They believed that their computer models, and an improved understanding of how markets and the economy worked, would allow them to see problems in time and halt them. Obviously, they were wrong.

Regulators, no matter how diligent or well-staffed or well-funded, never have

(1) The same degree and timeliness of access to information about a business and its daily operations as the people who run it and interact continuously with its employees; or

(2) The same incentive to ensure the continuing profitability of the business as the people who draw their income from it.

Also, while you do get good people who go into government for all sorts of reasons, people who have the specific skill set of being really shrewd observers of financial markets are probably the people least inclined to take far lower-paying jobs regulating those markets than making money in them; draw what conclusions you will about the ability of the regulatory agencies to be all-wise and all-seeing under the best of circumstances.

Now, if you are talking about regulating an industry to keep it from unscrupulously ripping off other people outside their businesses, at least you have an argument about whether people with less competence and less information are nonetheless properly charged with restricting the business' operations. But the crucial issue in debating the second-order aspects of the credit crisis (i.e., why institutions let themselves get overexposed to risks derived from bad loans), at the end of the day, is whether regulators were better situated to protect the interests of the financial industry itself than the people who worked in it. You should expect some skepticism about that kind of argument.

While I am at it, no surprise that Gov. Palin isn't distancing herself from McCain on immigration. The devil is in the details, though, as far as what hoops people have to jump through to get citizenship and what law enforcement tactics short of mass deportations would be appropriate.

I swear the immigration debate drives me up the wall. About 95% of it should be common sense. Enforce the border, make it hard for illegal aliens to get jobs and don't give them driver's licenses, make it faster and easier for people to come here legally, more guest workers and H1-B visas, make sure there are real but not impossible hurdles for illegal aliens who stay out of trouble and learn English to earn citizenship...I know all of that would set people off Left and Right, but really it's not hard to come up with a non-ideological, common-sense set of proposals that the broad middle of this country can accept. But the whole thing always gets framed as an ideological death struggle between mass deportation and mass amnesty.

* - Goolsbee is a living reminder that Obama never really gets rid of people who embarrass him, he just hides them a while until the coast is clear.

** - Mickey Kaus has explained how bogus, toothless 'work requirements' were an old dodge by opponents of welfare reform...hey, guess who was one of those in 1996? Barack Obama!

*** - Which are intended to replace the current tax subsidy for employer-provided health care. Funny how the Obama camp will attack removal of the tax subsidy as a tax hike and attack the refundable credit as a giveaway rather than admit that the two are linked - the point of the proposal is to shift people into the individual market and make health care more portable and less tied to your job.

PS, you really do have to read that Tomasky piece on Rudy, one that such a liberal journalist would never have written if he'd been the GOP nominee in 2008:

There's one way of measuring a politician's success. The things he did in his day that were controversial - are they accepted wisdom now? One can't say "yes" to that question about everything Rudy did, by a long shot. But as far as that first year is concerned, this is true: No person could run for mayor and be taken seriously by saying or suggesting that he or she would depart radically from the basic path Giuliani set in 1994-95. Bring in more accountability, apply a new and needed standard of civic behavior, be forceful but fair with the unions, get the cops out on the street, prove that things that were broken could be fixed. It couldn't be done. The local Democratic Party, which I scolded eleven years ago in the pages of this magazine...for its tectonic adaptation to the new rules, has learned this lesson too slowly. Or has it even learned it yet?

Almost every favorable word the WaPo writes about Obama is based on their hopes and projections about what they think and hope he might do as president, not what he actually has done.

+++

So how about international trade? Where's the historic evidence on that? "We also can only hope that the alarming anti-trade rhetoric we have heard from Mr. Obama during the campaign would give way to the understanding of the benefits of trade reflected in his writings." Let's see: Campaign promises made to anti-trade unions who've given him millions of dollars and votes, on the one hand, versus vague sentiments in his second book and the WaPo's "hopes," on the other hand. Which weighs more? Hopes!

+++

There's never a "we know he would do this" because he "successfully championed legislation." There's never a "we know he's really committed to that" because "he risked his career by bucking his own party." Instead - as the WaPo again admits - "We had hoped, throughout this long campaign, to see more evidence that Mr. Obama might stand up to Democratic orthodoxy and end, as he said in his announcement speech, 'our chronic avoidance of tough decisions.'" Earth to WaPo: When you hope something, and it never comes true, that's called a "hoping in vain."

Iraq, of course, is one of the classic examples of this. Sooner or later, the next president will face decisions that create a tension between the desire to bring the troops home ASAP and the need to keep a certain number of boots on the ground to avoid having the hard-won successes of the past two years unravel. You can insist until you are blue in the face that such tradeoffs don't exist, but that's the reality: we may be less needed and in lesser numbers than before, but our troops are still performing important functions in helping the Iraqi government and military solidify the gains that have been made.

When those tensions arise, when top military brass and experts in the area are saying they need to have less aggressive withdrawal timetables and the anti-war movement is pressing for a rapid pullout, which side will Obama choose? The anti-war faction looks at his 2002 war speech and 2007-08 opposition to the surge, and tell themselves that Obama will side with them. The rest - including conservative Democrats who, like the WaPo editorial board, may not now think the war was a good idea but think precipitate withdrawal would be disastrous - look at his 'stay the course' position of 2003-06 and his more conciliatory statements during the general election, and tell themselves that he will side with security.

They can't both be right. And realistically, even given the strong signal of his opposition to the surge, there's no way for anybody to be quite certain which side is being lied to by Obama. Maybe he doesn't even know.

Of course, that sort of hedging act is done by almost every politician...but with Obama, it encompasses nearly everything in his record, because even on issues like abortion where he's staked out a very consistently extreme record for a period of years, people seem to convince themselves that he's been lying all along, he doesn't, for example, really support federal taxpayer money to subsidize abortions.

This essay captures the same dynamic regarding how Obama's religion is viewed by people who find Gov. Palin's religious beliefs in and of themselves alarming:

Many critics stand ready to mock Palin's Christianity. Fair enough. Will they also mock Obama's and Biden's?

Christianity is a miracle religion. Absent belief in the miraculous, there is nothing left of Christianity worth the name.

Here is the story in a nutshell: Christ was both man and God. God took on human flesh and entered into the physical world to perform a mission. The mission was to save the fallen human race, and to do so Christ had to die and then rise from the dead. That is why Easter, not Christmas, is the greatest of Christian holidays. It celebrates the Resurrection, the central dogma of Christianity. This is not my just my opinion, it is orthodox Christian teaching. In Corinthians 15:17 Paul states that "if Christ be not raised, your faith is in vain".

Obama has gone on record as stating that Christ is his Lord, that he prays to Jesus. I see three possibilities:

1. Obama was lying: he believes no such thing, but finds it politically expedient to claim he does.
2. Obama accepts as fact the Resurrection of Christ.
3. Obama is an idiot.

Obama is no idiot. So does he believe that a corpse dead on Friday came back to life on Sunday? And if so, does he accept as facts the rest of Christ's miracles? Prior to his death, Christ is said to have resurrected a corpse, made the blind see, walked on water, and turned water into wine. I can't see why anyone would believe in the Resurrection, and deny the rest. Why strain at gnats?

The theory that the earth is only 6000 years old appears to be pre-scientific nonsense. It contradicts known facts about the rates at which radioactive materials decay. By the same token, a corpse coming back to life violates the laws of thermodynamics, and walking on water violates the laws of gravity.

So far as I know Palin is not a Young Earther. But if she were, her belief would be no more at odds with science than is Obama's stated belief that Christ is Lord. I suspect those who mock Palin's belief without mocking Obama's do so because in their hearts they imagine that Obama does not actually believe. He just says what he has to say to attain power. And they're ok with that. They mock Palin because they imagine she means what she says.

H/T, via Ace. It's the same thing again. Those who find Obama's Christianity reassuring tell themselves that he believes. Those who find Christianity disturbing tell themselves that he doesn't really mean it. Willing suspension of disbelief.

*Obama campaign flacks attacking McCain for failing to "vet" a guy who only became an issue because Obama showed up in his yard.

*Ben Smith dug up his voter registration. (More here).

*The media dug up tax liens on him *

*Not only did reporters go after his licensing as a plumber, but now government officials are after his business.

*Lefty blogs publishing his home address and writing up attacks on him and digging into his family tree.

*Here's a NY Times article digging up more dirt on Joe than they've bothered to cobble together on Obama, and another here.

*Andrew Sullivan finds a new obsession with the plumber, reducing this man to a "hood ornament[]" (here, here, and here).

*Here is a roundup of the media frenzy. Remember, read all these and ask yourself when the last time was you saw a report on, say, Barack Obama's relationship with the Chicago political machine.

(As Ace notes, the Chicago-style ton of bricks dropped on Joe should help intimidate people who might actually come forward with stories from Obama's past he doesn't want told)

UPDATE: McCain defends ordinary Joe:

The response from Senator Obama and his campaign yesterday was to attack Joe. People are digging through his personal life and he has TV crews camped out in front of his house. He didn't ask for Senator Obama to come to his house. He wasn't recruited or prompted by our campaign. He just asked a question. And Americans ought to be able to ask Senator Obama tough questions without being smeared and targeted with political attacks.

SECOND UPDATE: Brian Faughnan notes that the people attacking Joe used to claim to care about privacy. What a surprise. It's not shocking to find either side using double standards on this sort of thing, but as usual what's missing is some degree of perspective about what's even a relevant basis for invading this guy's private life - the whole point here is that he asked Obama a question, and Obama gave a revealing answer, and he winds up with goons trying to run him out of business and posting his address online and freaking out because he goes by his middle name.

In the Frost case Brian notes, I'd agree that some people went overboard - but the essential question was the assertion that the Frost family needed and deserved government assistance at their income level. Joe the Plumber's basic point wasn't even about his current income, but about what happened if he succeeded in making more money.

I generally despise this sort of politics by anecdote, precisely because it drags us into this sort of morass. But remember: the essential question here is what Obama said. It's rather telling the panicked lashing out at an ordinary citizen that has resulted even at a time when he's leading in the polls. And it doesn't bode well at all for the next person who asks Obama a question he doesn't like.

(1) No Taxes Hikes of Any Kind Below $250,000

Obama has made three unambiguous-sounding "read my lips" style promises about taxes and spending in this race. One of these he left himself no room to back away from:

If you are a family making less than $250,000 a year, my plan will not raise your taxes. Period. Not income tax, not payroll tax, not capital gains tax, not any of your taxes. And chances are you will get a tax cut.

I suppose the Clintonian wiggle room there is the "my plan," present tense, and those of us who are familiar with the Democrats' M.O., who remember Bill Clinton throwing his middle class tax cut under the bus barely weeks after being elected, and who (as the McCain camp has pointed out relentlessly) saw Obama vote for a party-line budget resolution that would have extended tax hikes much lower down the income ladder know that Obama is highly unliklely to keep this promise. But it has, in fact, been stated with such clarity that if elected, Obama will properly be found to have lied to the American people if he breaks it by raising any tax of any kind paid by anyone with an income below $250,000. George H.W. Bush can tell you how that worked out.

(2) Tax Cuts For 95% of...Who?

Here is Obama in the second debate: "I want to provide a tax cut for 95 percent of Americans, 95 percent."

Is that 95% of current federal taxpayers? 95% of all households? 95% of all Americans, including children? Phil Klein of the American Spectator has tried to get the Obama campaign to clarify who this is 95% of and what the plan actually consists of (what rates, if any, will go down, for example), and can't get an answer (this in contrast to, say, the Bush tax cut plan in 2000, which was famously detailed).

The Wall Street Journal, of course, has noted that a lot of his "tax cuts" will actually involve the federal government cutting checks to people who currently pay no federal income taxes:

All but the clean car credit would be "refundable," which is Washington-speak for the fact that you can receive these checks even if you have no income-tax liability. In other words, they are an income transfer -- a federal check -- from taxpayers to nontaxpayers. Once upon a time we called this "welfare," or in George McGovern's 1972 campaign a "Demogrant." Mr. Obama's genius is to call it a tax cut.

The Tax Foundation estimates that under the Obama plan 63 million Americans, or 44% of all tax filers, would have no income tax liability and most of those would get a check from the IRS each year. The Heritage Foundation's Center for Data Analysis estimates that by 2011, under the Obama plan, an additional 10 million filers would pay zero taxes while cashing checks from the IRS.

The total annual expenditures on refundable "tax credits" would rise over the next 10 years by $647 billion to $1.054 trillion, according to the Tax Policy Center. This means that the tax-credit welfare state would soon cost four times actual cash welfare. By redefining such income payments as "tax credits," the Obama campaign also redefines them away as a tax share of GDP. Presto, the federal tax burden looks much smaller than it really is.

The political left defends "refundability" on grounds that these payments help to offset the payroll tax. And that was at least plausible when the only major refundable credit was the earned-income tax credit. Taken together, however, these tax credit payments would exceed payroll levies for most low-income workers.

To any sane person, sending a check to someone who does not pay taxes is called "spending," not tax cuts - a policy of taxes and spending designed explicily for purposes not of financing the government's necessary operations but to "spread the wealth around," as Obama now-famously told Joe the Plumber, or "for purposes of fairness" as he told Charlie Gibson in the debate back in April.

Obama should be forced to come clean: 95% of who? Will he cut any tax rates, or just offer to cut a bunch of checks? If he won't clarify his promise, he can fairly be blamed for breaking another pledge if the percentage of current federal taxpayers whose tax liability doesn't go down under an Obama Administration ends up being, as most of us expect, vastly lower than 95%.

(3) Has Obama Abandoned His Promise of a Net Spending Cut? Where are the Loopholes?

Here's Obama in the second debate again:

[W]hat I've proposed, you'll hear Sen. McCain say, well, he's proposing a whole bunch of new spending, but actually I'm cutting more than I'm spending so that it will be a net spending cut.

Pretty unambiguous: he has promised the American people a net reduction in federal spending. Even if we assume that Obama (silently) excludes spending on existing entitlements from that calculation, it's another read-my-lips promise he can be held to, and that he is 100% certain to break if elected.

Now here is Obama in the third debate - watch carefully:

OBAMA: Well, first of all, I think it's important for the American public to understand that the $750 billion rescue package, if it's structured properly, and, as president, I will make sure it's structured properly, means that ultimately taxpayers get their money back, and that's important to understand.

But there is no doubt that we've been living beyond our means and we're going to have to make some adjustments.

Now, what I've done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut. I haven't made a promise about...

SCHIEFFER: But you're going to have to cut some of these programs, certainly.

OBAMA: Absolutely. So let me get to that. What I want to emphasize, though, is that I have been a strong proponent of pay-as- you-go. Every dollar that I've proposed, I've proposed an additional cut so that it matches.

OBAMA: And some of the cuts, just to give you an example, we spend $15 billion a year on subsidies to insurance companies. It doesn't -- under the Medicare plan -- it doesn't help seniors get any better. It's not improving our health care system. It's just a giveaway.

We need to eliminate a whole host of programs that don't work. And I want to go through the federal budget line by line, page by page, programs that don't work, we should cut. Programs that we need, we should make them work better.

Now, what is true is that Senator McCain and I have a difference in terms of the need to invest in America and the American people. I mentioned health care earlier.

If we make investments now so that people have coverage, that we are preventing diseases, that will save on Medicare and Medicaid in the future.

If we invest in a serious energy policy, that will save in the amount of money we're borrowing from China to send to Saudi Arabia.

If we invest now in our young people and their ability to go to college, that will allow them to drive this economy into the 21st century.

But what is absolutely true is that, once we get through this economic crisis and some of the specific proposals to get us out of this slump, that we're not going to be able to go back to our profligate ways.

And we're going to have to embrace a culture and an ethic of responsibility, all of us, corporations, the federal government, and individuals out there who may be living beyond their means.

Some of Obama's blogospheric supporters on the far left, like Matt Stoller and Firedoglake, think that line about "once we get through this economic crisis and some of the specific proposals to get us out of this slump" means that he'll suspend his "pay as you go"/"net spending cut" promise for as long as he can say we are working to get out of a slump. On the Right, Soren Dayton and Jon Henke agree with Stoller's reading. (Ezra Klein noted in 2007 that Obama promised YearlyKos that he would not treat many of his new spending programs as subject to "PayGo" rules - he may be creating a loophole for himself by calling them "investment," although he revealed none of that in the debates.)

Me, I don't see it; I think a natural reading of Obama's statement was that he was promising that the spending discipline he claims to be imposing would persist even after budgetary good times returned. But the media should press him to commit on this. Those of us who recall the porous "firewall" of the "peace dividend" debates of 1991-94 remember well how skilled Congressional Democrats are at coming up with "exceptions" to spending rules that allow them to spend money they promised not to spend.

On that note, Obama should answer two more questions. One, which I think his plan already answers, is that he's not going to count cutting his "spread the wealth" checks to non-taxpayers as spending. If you can hand out a trillion dollars in checks, your political need to "spend" is greatly alleviated.

The second is whether he's planning to support billions in additional spending pushed by his party's Congressional leadership on top of this year's budget, in special sessions after the election:

After consulting with Barack Obama, Democratic leaders are likely to call Congress back to work after the election in hopes of passing legislation that would include extended jobless benefits, money for food stamps and possibly a tax rebate, officials said Saturday.

The bill's total cost could reach $150 billion, these officials said.

The officials stressed that no final decisions have been made. They spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they did not want to pre-empt a formal announcement. House Democrats have announced plans for an economic forum on Monday "to help Congress develop an economic recovery plan that focuses on creating jobs and strengthening our economy."

Democrats said Obama's campaign has been involved in discussions on a possible stimulus package.

If Obama is planning to push $150 billion in new spending in November, will he insist on a net spending cut, or is this yet another loophole so he can tell the American people one thing and do something completely different?

Or will the press just focus on Joe the Plumber's record?