election

The financial services industry is tanking. Here's what McCain and Obama won't tell you about the crisis.

When John McCain said last week that the "fundamentals of our economy are still strong," he was wrong twice. First, he was wrong to suggest that the annihilation of modern investment banking was something peripheral to economy. Second, when he claimed that "fundamentals" referred to the robust American workforce, he was wrong again to suggest that average Americans somehow represent a fortress of strength against the onslaught of the credit crisis. On the contrary, we've met the enemy, and the enemy is in our own purses and pockets.

On his radio show, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson accused Barack Obama of "deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible" and promoting a "lowest common denominator of morality."

On the face of it, Dobson's comments seem like a bizarre overreaction to a two-year-old Obama speech, in which he argued for a progressive politics more accommodating to religious believers while taking some (relatively gentle) jabs at religious conservatives. It's easier to understand Dobson's outburst, though, in the context of events like Obama's recent off-the-record meeting with evangelical leaders, after which one attendee wrote that Obama "came across as thoughtful and much more of a 'centrist' than what I would have expected," and added that while he would be voting for McCain, he wouldn't be surprised if the 2008 race were "the first time a majority of evangelicals will vote for a Democrat for president since Jimmy Carter."

With the final pair of primary contests in the books, Hillary Clinton has been mathematically eliminated from the race for the Democratic nomination.

The 1992 campaign was the first election that I followed closely, and with some understanding of what was going on. I was twelve, the son of two diehard Baby-Boomer Democrats, and every night we kept up with the race on ABC's World News Tonight, where the late Peter Jennings jousted entertainingly with then-White House correspondent Brit Hume. During the Connecticut primary, when the Democratic race was down to Clinton and Jerry Brown, my father took me out to Wooster Square, the old Italian neighborhood in New Haven, to see the Man from Hope put in an appearance. (All I remember is the top of his head, gray but not yet silver, bobbing just above the crowd.) Later, my parents made a sign -- this was just after the Republican Convention -- that read "Our Family Values Clinton" and took it to rallies, where at different moments my mother managed to shake both Clintons' hands. (Bill was warm, she told me, and definitely sexy. Hillary was cold.)

Primaries in Oregon and Kentucky drew attention to the salience of the white working class vote.

There was every reason to believe that the primaries in Oregon and Kentucky would end with Senator Barack Obama winning a majority of pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention, reinforcing the widespread sense that Senator Clinton is at this point running a vanity campaign, a highly expensive effort to enhance her self-esteem. Thoughts naturally turn to the general election, in which Oregon and Kentucky (and states very much like them) will prove crucially important to building an electoral-college majority. Both have an unusually high proportion of white working class voters, as Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz note in a brilliant report on the changing class composition of the American electorate, and this represents a challenge to Obama, who has (as Clinton reminds us incessantly) had a hard time connecting with these voters.

Barack Obama addressed a rally at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one week before that state's Democratic primary.

It was a college crowd: young women with Kool Aid-dyed hair, mop-topped men in novelty bow-ties, kids wearing t-shirts that advertised ironic slogans ("Super Jew!") and summer holidays to Angkor Wat -- all grooving to "Big Yellow Taxi." But it was also more. A scan of the seats revealed lots of normal people as well, including a robust and enthusiastic contingent of African-Americans, thrilled to be in an Obama coalition, and by all evidence grooving to the Joni Mitchell just as to the Motown.

The coalition looked broad and deep. It did not, however, look like America, or even North Carolina. MORE

Hillary Clinton wins the Pennsylvania primary with 55% of the vote.

Does Hillary Clinton represent the future of the Democratic party? At first glance, the idea seems laughable. As Ruy Teixeira has observed, the white working class - the core of Clinton's support in Pennsylvania and in the Democratic electorate writ large - is shrinking as a share of the U.S. population, while the mass upper middle class, a crucially important of Obama's base (and one that enjoys outsized cultural and political influence), is expanding at a rapid clip. And though Clinton has won a large share of the growing Latino vote, it's possible - as a number of Obama partisans have suggested - that this could be a function of some combination of '90s nostalgia and a reluctance on the part of new immigrants and second-generation Americans to embrace a politics of hope and change, both effects that will presumably erode over time.

Even with the Democratic Party locked in a fierce civil war, John McCain still hasn't pulled ahead of either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in national polls.

The Democratic primary campaign - divisive, bitter, and seemingly endless - has made many Republicans optimistic about their party's prospects for retaining the White House this November. But the numbers still seem to tell a different story -- and not just secondary indicators like the enormous gap between McCain's fundraising and the dollars his Democratic rivals are raking in, or the underlying economic realities that will make this a tough year for the GOP no matter what. The polls themselves aren't running McCain's way, or at least not to the extent that would justify the current wave of conservative optimism about November.

John McCain sketched out his economic agenda in an address at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University.

McCain's speech reads like an attempt to unify a divided party by offering every faction something to make them happy. For the GOP's supply-siders and business interests, there are promises to extend the Bush tax cuts and slash corporate rates. For moderate Republicans clinging to seats in Democratic states, there's a pledge to cut the Alternative Minimum Tax, which hits upper-middle class Blue Staters hardest. For free traders, there's a shout-out to the Colombian Free Trade Agreement; for flat-tax obsessives, there's a call for an alternative tax-filing option, featuring just two brackets instead of four or five. For deficit hawks and porkbusters, there's a promise to veto any bill with earmarks, an attack on corporate welfare, and a call for a one-year freeze in discretionary spending and a top-to-bottom review of every agency's budget. For entitlement reformers, there's a call to means-test the prescription drugs benefit. There's even something for the small band of conservatives (this writer among them) who have been agitating for a distinctively pro-family economic agenda, in the form of a pledge to double the tax exemption for dependents, from $3500 to $7000.

Barack Obama's remarks concerning the supposed bitterness of working-class Pennsylvanians have caused considerable controversy.

Was Barack Obama wrong to suggest that a sense of bitterness and disappointment has driven working-class voters to "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them"? Note that Obama was making a number of discrete, subtle points. First, he was offering an implicit critique of the Clinton Administration, which made promises that were left unfulfilled. Second, he was trying to offer a rationale for holding views that his audience of affluent liberals might find distasteful. And third, he was making the eminently defensible and almost banal observation that people who are disappointed by high politics will often turn to primary loyalties -- the traditional, familiar truths of faith and family that endure when all else changes.

John McCain raised $15 million in March. Hillary Clinton raised $20 million and Barack Obama raised over $40 million in the same month.

As Marc Ambinder reports, the McCain campaign raised only $4 million online and through direct mail. Barack Obama, meanwhile, has over 1.3 million donors, a number that will surely increase if he wins the Democratic nomination. So far, McCain has caught a lucky break. MORE

Mark Penn resigned as Hillary Clinton's chief strategist, amid criticism for taking consulting contracts that clashed with Clinton's policies.

The news of Penn's having been forced out set off a wave of recrimination that's likely to last all week, in part because Penn won't have many defenders. Few people in politics are as reviled, especially inside the Clinton campaign, where he feuded with just about everybody.

A New York Times/CBS News poll finds that eighty-one percent of Americans think the country is now on the "wrong track."

That Americans are pessimistic isn't terribly surprising: The last year of the Bush Era feels like a cross between the final days of the Truman and the Carter Administrations, with a widely-disliked president presiding over an unpopular foreign war and a struggling economy -- a rare and understandably dispiriting combination. Still, the depths of the public's discouragement about America's prospects is striking, and one statistic in particular from the Times poll should be pasted on every political journalist's bulletin board: "Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off."

Hillary Clinton's latest ad features the senator taking a call at three in the morning to respond to an economic crisis.

When I asked Steve Schmidt, a senior McCain adviser, to give his impression of the ad, he quipped: "It's more likely that the call at 3 a.m. is, 'Senator, you've just lost another superdelegate.'" Mark McKinnon, an even more creative McCain adviser, had an idea: the campaign should respond with an "ad" of its own. Calls were made. McCain ad whiz Justin Germany worked with McKinnon's script and had the video ready a few hours later.

Having apparently lost Zimbabwe's presidential election, Robert Mugabe is said to be considering stepping down after 28 increasingly tyrannical years in office.

Now is the first time in nearly a decade when it would be only foolish and loopy, and not downright insane, to invest in the Zimbabwean dollar. When I visited in 2001, Zimbabwean currency was losing its value at catastrophic rates, which led to scenes of South Africans' rushing over the border to spend their rand on quick, absurdly cheap holidays in Zimbabwe. It was like Weimar Germany with elephants and baobabs, and even with its own homegrown "Hitler." If Mugabe leaves, will tourism recover? Will the farms (Zimbabwe's main foreign-exchange earner) produce more? They could hardly produce less.

Two prominent Catholic conservatives have endorsed Barack Obama for President.

The differences between the arguments that Douglas Kmiec and Andrew Bacevich have deployed to explain their support for Obama speaks volumes about how hard it is to generalize about Catholic conservatives, let alone Catholics as a whole. MORE

In his first foreign-policy address since winning the GOP nomination, John McCain argued that the U.S. has a "moral obligation" to fulfill in Iraq.

Place McCain's speech side by side with the address Barack Obama delivered last week, on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and you don't just have two divergent takes on the war in Iraq. You have two completely different prisms through which to view the conflict.

In Taiwan's presidential contest, Ma Ying-jeou of the Kuomintang defeated Frank Hsieh of the Democratic Progressive Party by an overwhelming margin.

The Kuomintang, perhaps the strangest, most resilient political organization in history, is back in yet another guise. Ma Ying-jeou is an affable, U.S.-educated, pro-market moderate. His most distinguishing feature might be his unwillingness to use scabrous rhetoric to denounce his opponents -- highly unusual in Taiwan's shall-we-say robust public discourse. MORE

Bill Richardson, former presidential hopeful and current New Mexico governor, endorsed Barack Obama for president.

Few politicians are as accomplished as Richardson; even fewer are as accomplished while projecting his air of bumbling and incompetence. By many accounts this impression is just a lack of charisma, and he has "substance" to make up for it. But the endorsement, embraced publicly by Obama, should provoke private shudders: This man is hexed. MORE

David Paterson, the new governor of New York, has acknowledged taking part in a number of extramarital affairs.

During a memorable 1976 Playboy interview, then-presidential candidate Jimmy Carter confessed to having "looked on a lot of women with lust." For Carter, a born-again Christian, merely looking on a woman with lust constituted adultery. But he also added that he was unwilling to condemn homewrecking philanderers, as it would be un-Christlike to, in Carter's colorful words, "consider yourself better than someone else because one guy screws a whole bunch of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife."

So it's safe to say that David Paterson, Eliot Spitzer's successor, can count on Jimmy Carter's continued support. Yes, Paterson tells us, he has screwed a whole bunch of women. (Paterson's wife also pursued a little sexual healing on the side during a particularly rocky time in their marriage.) But at least he's upfront about it. And after Spitzer's tawdry adventures as Client 9, New Yorkers can at least be grateful that no money changed hands.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton woo superdelegates and vie for the Democratic nomination -- but at what cost to the party?

As if further proof were needed, this front-page piece on superdelegates in Sunday's New York Times confirms what everyone already knows: the Democratic primary fight is damaging the party. What's irksome about the piece (and the accompanying video) is not the point it makes, but the superdelegates themselves -- to be specific, the uncommitted superdelegates, who are forever alternating between pious concern about the damage inflicted on their party and boundless self-regard as they patiently explain their decision to "keep their powder dry" and withhold until the Democratic convention in August their Solomonic decision on which candidate to support.

As the economy turns toward recession, the candidates are revising their plans and messages.

The economy writ large -- the crisis in the financial markets, the panics and contagion, the lockdown of the lending markets, et. al. -- will be the totalizing narrative of the next six months in our politics, policy, government and society. When a new president takes over, the Federal Reserve may have run out of basis points to cut. Inflation will be higher. The credit markets will still be in capital preservation mode, trying to conserve all the cash they can. So businesses won't be able to invest. Consumer spending will be negligible. Containing the crisis -- to the extent that fiscal policy and the moral suasion of the executive can contain the crisis -- will be extraordinarily difficult, and it will be the defining problem of the next president's first term. MORE

Video emerged of Barack Obama's pastor's saying that the U.S. invited the September 11 attacks with its support for state terrorism abroad.

Ever since the rise of the religious right, conservative politicians have attempted a delicate two-step with conservative Christianity's more extreme elements, simultaneously welcoming their support and keeping their more outlandish positions at arm's length. Now it's Barack Obama's turn to try the same trick -- except that the extremist in question is the pastor of his church, a spiritual mentor, and the man who married him and baptized his children. MORE

Barack Obama wins handily in Mississippi.

The most important number for Hillary Clinton coming out of last night's defeat in Mississippi isn't twenty-three (Barack Obama's margin of victory, in percentage points) or five (the number of delegates he'll add to his almost certainly insurmountable pledged-delegate lead), but 98,589 -- his margin in the popular vote, which will be tacked on to his pre-existing edge of roughly 646,000. For Clinton to have any chance at persuading the Democratic superdelegates to put her over the top at the convention, this is the lead she needs to reduce or wipe away. MORE

Oregon's junior senator, Republican Gordon Smith, faces an impressive -- and unusual -- Democratic challenger.

Every election cycle seems to bring one or two candidates who don't rise to national prominence, but whose curious biography, bizarre sense of humor, or plucky underdog perseverance in the face of long odds makes you root for them anyway. A few years ago, Blair Hull was my guy: professional Vegas card-counter turned math whiz who made a fortune in the market and decided to run for Illinois's open Senate seat (as it happened, against a guy named Barack Obama). MORE

Hillary Clinton defeated Barack Obama in the Texas and Ohio primaries — reopening the race, and inviting new speculation over the 2008 Democratic ticket.

Consider the unheralded virtues of an Obama-Clinton ticket. First, politics. Both durable, distinct factions of the Democratic party — united, and working at full throttle. McCain's national-security edge — blunted overnight. Obama's domestic-policy edge — sharpened instantly. Ohio, Michigan, Florida, New Mexico — suddenly, much less a worry for Democrats. MORE

Michael Bloomberg decides against running for president as an independent.

So who cares, right? Isn't Bloomberg just a rich dilettante? Actually, no. He was, by a wide margin, the best qualified of all the imaginable presidential candidates. Granted, he's not the kind of political figure who sends reporters into crazed reveries, and as a mouthy lower-middle-class kid from Medford, Massachusetts he doesn't embody America's changetastic post-ethnic future. He is simply the best mayor New York has ever had. Bloomberg's two terms have been marked by impressive improvements in the city's fiscal health, the crime rate, education, and environmental quality. And he accomplished all this by charming and disarming the same entrenched interests his predecessors failed to break through direct confrontation.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama square off in what is very likely to be their last debate.

For those of us who've watched about seventeen million Democratic primary debates since the campaign kicked off, last night's debate was profoundly unedifying. Wrangling over the question of an individual mandate to purchase health insurance does not, for example, become more interesting on repeat viewing. Worse, a large number of left-of-center experts believe that this disagreement isn't actually important, and has only come to appear significant because it's been talked about so much. To admirers of Bill Clinton's record on trade policy, it was somewhat painful to watch Barack Obama assail it followed by Hillary trying to insist that she'd never said anything positive about NAFTA rather than defending her husband's eminently defensible record (and her own history of public statements) on the merits.

Perhaps the debate's most noteworthy moment was when Tim Russert managed to remind us all once again why he's one of the most pernicious forces working in journalism today, seeking to link Obama to Louis Farrakhan's record of anti-Semitic statetements. Obama, of course, reiterated the fact that he harbored no such sentiments and had condemned Farrakhan on many occasions. Clinton responded with a bizarre salvo that sums up much of what's gone wrong with her campaign -- haranguing Obama for "denouncing" Farrakhan rather than "rejecting" his support.

As a result, the Democrats appear set to nominate a candidate with both a record and a platform that are a good deal more liberal than what the party's offered in recent years without him ever having faced sustained criticism from the right. For a liberal, freedom from the timidity that's reigned in the Democratic Party ever since 1994 is an exciting prospect, but a moment's thought of how untested the new, more self-confident liberalism actually is is also a bit frightening.

Dmitry Medvedev, Vladimir Putin's chosen successor, is all but assured election as Russia's next president.

Medvedev has been heralded as a friendlier, more pro-Western Russian leader than his patron. Putin was the hard man Russia needed to get past the chaos and cronyism of the Yeltsin years, or so a large majority of Russians have come to believe. Apart from terrorizing a small handful of opposition-aligned kleptocrats and independent journalists, Putin's Russia has also seen a wave of repression against Caucasian minorities, ranging from crackdowns on Georgian-owned businesses to the tacit toleration of thuggish attacks on dark-skinned Muslims. So there's a certain rough justice in recent "accusations" against Putin's heir. It seems that Medvedev's mother's maiden name is commonly identified as Jewish, and Russian bigots are exercised to say the least. To his credit, Medvedev has refused to confirm or deny the rumors, as he forthrightly opposes anti-Semitism. But does he oppose the poisonous xenophobia that defines the political movement of which he's become the standardbearer? Does he even have the power to do so?

Pakistan held elections, and the Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif parties trounced Pervez Musharraf.

The two victorious parties ruled Pakistan between the late 1980s and the late 1990s -- a disastrous period for Pakistan, with corruption out of control and sectarian violence endemic in Karachi. The situation was so bad that when Musharraf staged his coup, the country's civil-society intellectuals greeted it with relief. The two parties are still feudal, and there is little to indicate they will govern better than they did a decade ago. In Pakistan, neither military nor democratic rule has worked.

But there seems to be no other way forward. I expect a weakening of security with an unwieldy coalition, and a vacuum filled by extremists.   At least the Islamic parties fared badly.

Ralph Nader is once again launching a bid for the presidency.

According to a "Rasmussen Reports poll taken in late January", a McCain-Obama race would leave considerable room for minor party challengers. Ron Paul, the anti-war libertarian firebrand, would garner an extraordinary 11 percent of the vote. Ross Perot, by way of comparison, won just under 19 percent of the vote in 1992. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg would win a respectable 5 percent. And as for Ralph Nader, well, Rasmussen didn't bother to include him in its fanciful scenario, most likely because his time has definitively passed. If we're going to have a fifth-party crank in the race, let it be someone colorful and costumed, like erstwhile Texas gubernatorial candidate "Kinky Friedman" or litigious chessmaster and veteran cabdriver "M. Ismail Sloan".

The New York Times hints at a McCain affair, and the crowd goes wild.

That wheezing noise you hear is the sound of Rush Limbaugh climbing down from his tree. Having inveighed against John McCain for months -- the wearisome Ann Coulter said she would support Hillary Clinton over him -- assorted right-wing commentators found their bluff called as he locked up the nomination. But, putting a new twist on the proverb that the enemy of your enemy is your friend, The New York Times has tossed the commentariat a line by publishing its report on McCain's coziness with lobbyists. "The lesson is liberals are to be defeated," Limbaugh grumbled, as he maneuvered his bulk earthward. Meanwhile, the chin-stroking has begun: Should the Times have hinted that McCain had a special interest in one lobbyist? Should it have run the story at all? Quibbles aside, the piece was legitimate, and press critics should be grateful that as their advertisers slip away, their stock prices sink, and their armchair critics multiply, the big papers are still ponying up for long-term investigations. What's too bad is that some truly shocking revelations haven't gotten so much attention. Maybe it's just not a scandal without sex. MORE

Hillary Clinton campaign struggles to recapture her once-formidable lead over Barack Obama.

Barack Obama may well be ready to destroy the deepest, most fundamental law of the political universe: that somewhere, somehow, the Clintons will find a way to win.

How can Hillary Clinton possibly pull this off? The mathematics are there. If two-thirds of the remaining superdelegates -- what her campaign cleverly and class-consciously insists on calling the “automatic” delegates -- break her way, then she will win.  The history is there, and this race has been full of black-swan moments.

The remaining 16 states and 816-odd pledged delegates will probably cut in her favor. Forget these static factors: for the first time, the elite political class is finally beginning to question -- or at least, to be aware of -- some of the irritating messianism of Barack Obama. 

Barack Obama wins convincingly in Maryland, D.C., and Virginia.

Is the Democratic race over? Has the momentum so decisively shifted to Barack Obama that Hillary Clinton no longer has a realistic chance? The most striking thing about last night's round of Potomac primaries is that results overturned the emerging consensus over "wine track" versus "beer track," women and men, blacks and Latinos. After Super Tuesday, Kenneth Bear noted that Clinton had become the candidate of the silent Democratic majority of working-class whites, Latinos, seniors, and women. But now that's changed as Obama racked up significant gains in these and other groups. To demonstrate that he's more than the candidate of feel-good politics, Obama is now training his guns on "Bush-McCain Republicans." And now the bruising counterattacks, the skullduggery, and the alarmism will begin anew.

McCain hasn't won the Republican nomination yet, but the fat lady is just about read to sing. So will the celebrated maverick right Rove's wrongs, win the White House, and build a more inclusive Republican majority? Or is he the second coming of Bob Dole, an irascible, ornery war hero with a temperament unsuited to the times? There have been moments when Americans valued the martial virtues most: duty, honor, courage. But these have been, in truth, brief moments, which followed the most serious, sustained, bloody conflicts -- the Civil War, the Second World War. Americans then inevitably turned to what you might call our national equilibrium, a state that is diverse, disputatious, commercially-minded, perhaps to a fault. It is this bustling, grasping, devout, disorderly country the aristocratic McCain hopes to lead, despite self-professed ignorance of matters economic, despite an apparent indifference to matters of the spirit. Republicans having second thoughts are running out of time ...  

The uses of diplomacy

Today Jendayi Frazer, the top US diplomat for African affairs, rendered a grim assessment of the post-election bloodbath in Kenya, saying it amounted to "ethnic cleansing," but not "genocide."  This distinction is so fine as to be described as "Talmudic," except that it contains no ancient Hebraic wisdom or indeed any other system of thought. MORE

Can John McCain be stopped?

Last night the battle for the Republican presidential nomination drew to a close. Or at least it seemed to draw to a close.  MORE