Some time ago – in fact just over eight years ago, Governor George W. Bush started describing himself as a “compassionate conservative”. Here’s the question: what was so compassionate about this president? Did he actually help the poorest members of society? Did he help those who were most disenfranchised? I see no evidence of his doing so. Perhaps it is unfair to judge him in this light given that he now seemingly defines his presidency as how he responded to the attacks on September 11th. Or perhaps we should simply not speak ill of the lame duck, not because it’s in bad taste but simply because it is not worth our time. But feel free if you like.
Update: Obama now up by 14
This according to a new CBS/New York Times poll. Why? For the precise reasons I’ve been writing: McCain has managed to dirty himself with the mud he and his running mate have been throwing. The funny thing is that the mud just keeps on coming. The next trick will be a new message from the McCain campaign. We call that “too little too late”.
Now some people are talking about The So-Called “Bradley Effect”, where Tom Bradley ran against George Deukmejian for California Governor and peaked too early and lost. This should not be confused with the Tom Bradley Blunder of the Lee Atwater Invitational Dead Pool. In the case of the Bradley Blunder, one of the invitational entrants mysteriously requested that Tom Bradley’s name be struck from her list of people to die. It later emerged that she had met the former mayer of Los Angeles and liked him. The lesson: never meet people who you bet money will die.
The (Interim) Results of Negativity
As I wrote previously, when you throw mud you had better make sure that your aim is true, and that you are pretty clean yourself. The McCain/Palin ticket cannot make either claim, and the results are in. An Washington Post/ABC Poll has Senator Obama now leading by 10%. This would be the official “I told you so”. There are perhaps other reasons why the Republicans are doing poorly, like the fact that Senator McCain’s message is not well received by a majority of Americans, or that he is viewed as part of the old guard that caused many of the problems we faced today.
Here is what we can expect for the next few weeks: intense campaiging by both sides, with a change of the message on the McCain side. As they can read polls as well as anyone else, they have probably already realized that mud slinging hurt them. Unfortunately, their latest approach is unlikely to work either. Senator McCain is proposing additional tax cuts. A change in the message at this point will demonstrate what Republicans often accused President Clinton of: waffling. While these times do call for some amount of flexibility to react to changing economic circumstances, Republicans break out the same old tune to all problems: tax cuts. That’s not flexibility – that’s a form of intransigence to play to their base.
Meanwhile, Senator Obama has rolled out his own plan. While he has already discussed middle class tax cuts, and that message hasn’t changed, he is now discussing something more valuable to Americans in distress: protection from being evicted from their homes. If overdone, this policy could be abused by people who have many homes, or who really have no intention of paying their fair share. But if administered judiciously, the policy provides for a limited period of relief for those who need to either renegotiate the terms of their loans or simply pick up and start again.
The wisdom of such a plan is this: banks don’t really want to foreclose right now. Flooding the market with distressed properties harms neighborhoods, and makes it increasingly difficult to actually recover equity. That is what has happened in central California and other places.
Showing vision and poise in the face of a serious global financial crisis is the sign of a true leader, and that will earn Barack Obama a slightly larger bump in the polls than he has now, probably another 2 to 4%. But we can then expect the race to tighten slightly at the end of the month. I predict nationally that Obama will win with an 8% margin, nationally. This says nothing about the electoral college count. I’ll leave that to others.
More abut the financial mess
We’ve already talked about how banking deregulation contributed to the current debacle. Now comes a story from The Register which discusses how naked shorts might have caused as much of a problem for the big brokerage houses. What is particularly sad about the story is that there was at least one person who raised the red flag and wasn’t allowed to publish an editorial in the Wall Street Journal.
This raises yet another concern for me. For me, the Wall Street Journal has long been the paper of record, when it comes to financial news. I have never thought much of their editorials, as they always seem to get it wrong. When they clamor for regulation and beat their fists against the desk, the sound is just a bit hollow to me, having read their constant anti-regulation protests.
Now with the purchase of the paper by right-wing media tycoon Rupert Murdock, I expect things to get worse. The web site has certainly already deteriorated in its new redesign. This leaves another open question. If the Wall Street Journal is deteriorating, where can one find a good daily market news source that has some amount of decent analysis to go with? I’m stumped.
Another question: did banks have substantial numbers of naked shorts that contributed to this mess? Was the firewall between their investment and banking arms sufficient? Certainly the failure of WaMu and others leads one to think the answer is “no”.
And The Mud Continues to Fly…
Yes, it seems as though the best chance Senator John McCain thinks he has is to throw mud, and he has begun the slinging by continuing the nonsensical charges about an association with someone who was a sixties radical that has been debunked in the major press outlets. Meanwhile, those same outlets (Reuters, CNN, New York Times) are reporting a gross abuse of power by McCain’s running mate, Governor Sarah Palin. What’s the chance that he has actually associated with Mrs. Palin? And this is the thing that scares me the most about this Republican ticket. Normally, I could care less about the VP pick. However, as the current VP has demonstrated an unhealthy predilection to abuse his power, I would like to see the practice stop. Worse, McCain is no spring chick. He could actually die in office, and this woman would then be able to continue her perssonal crusades, not from the Governor’s office, but from the Whitehouse.
In the meantime, President Bush is nowhere to be found, except in a sketchy piece in today’s New York Times, in which he told people that it’s a good thing he’s still president and that he wouldn’t have wanted to deal with the economic mess his own deregulation helped create day one in office. The problem with this statement is that he has spoiled nearly everything he has touched: our budget, education, foreign policy, our Constitution & Bill Of Rights, our standing in the world, and many other things. Please let’s hope the damage can be contained by a prompt change of power.