Food for thought: 

Considering America’s Depression-era politics in comparative perspective reinforces the impression that there may have been a good deal less real policy content to “throwing the bums out” than meets the eye. In the U.S., voters replaced Republicans with Democrats and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Sweden, voters replaced Conservatives with Liberals, then with Social Democrats, and the economy improved. In the Canadian agricultural province of Saskatchewan, voters replaced Conservatives with Socialists and the economy improved. In the adjacent agricultural province of Alberta, voters replaced a socialist party with a right-leaning funny-money party created from scratch by a charismatic radio preacher, and the economy improved. In Weimar Germany, where economic distress was deeper and longer-lasting, voters rejected all of the mainstream parties, the Nazis seized power, and the economy improved. In every case, the party that happened to be in power when the Depression eased dominated politics for a decade or more thereafter. It seems farfetched to imagine that all these contradictory shifts represented well-considered ideological conversions. A more parsimonious interpretation is that voters simply–and simple-mindedly–rewarded whoever happened to be in power when things got better.

Clearly we need now a fusion Conservative – Liberal – Socialist – Funny Money – Nazi – government, right?

Phillies up 2 to nothing in the playoff series.  This is good because I despise the Los Angeles Dodgers.   I have always hated the Dodgers, with a white hot passion, and have pumped my fist in triumph year in and year out when they’ve invariably been eliminated from post-season contention.

It is weird, because I don’t even have a team I root for.  I just root for the Dodgers to fail.  I think this came from my dad.  It really sticks with you, watching at the age of eight a ball-game with your dad.  I assume my father picked up his Dodgers – hatred from growing up near San Francisco, but he never rooted for the Giants.  Anyway, the Dodgers would cause him to rattle off, completely uncharacteristically, a string of profanity and bile toward their star players.

This spilled over into my brief woeful Little League career.  See, we were coached by this major Dodgers fan — this burly man Aaron Mantle, always wearing a Dodgers cap and asking “What would Tommy Lasorda Do?”.   He was interesting — something of the permanent little league coach and not a parent, and the norm for children’s sports’ leagues is that a parent of someone was the manager/coach.  But this did absolve some of the problems that come from that — preferential treatment to the coach’s kid, so maybe that should be the standard.

I wasn’t on that team too long.  The star of the team was also a big Dodgers fan.  He was a kid by the name of Mickey Ruth.  He started to tease me about this.  I didn’t have a leg to stand on, since the only reason I was ever pulled into a game was the “everyone plays” ethic which comes with Little League, and even at that I was always coached to bunt the ball.  But this intense confrontation eventually came to blows.  All I can say is that my parents picked me up, blood pouring out of my nose, and some raw skid marks on my arms.  I lied about what happened, and rattled off an incoherent and self-contradictory story, which at any rate went against the story as relayed later by Coach Mantle.  I only went to a couple more practices — even at that age, I could sense I was done.  My parents tried to gracefully exit me to something else and suggested I pick up Karate practice, which I agreed to but was never taken to.

The Little League team went on to win the World Series against a team from Taiwan, and Mickey Ruth became a major nationwide sensation.  Adding insult to injury, this was also the year that the Dodgers won the pennant.  My hatred for the Dodgers intensified.  A few years later, I experienced great schaudenfruede when it was revealed that Ruth was a ringer who was lying about his age and was actually seventeen years old, which also helped me feel better about him beating me to a pulp.  I cannot quite recall what happened to the rest of that team’s championship title, and now that I think about it it must have been shattering — but Hey!  I had no connection to that team, so what did I care?  And I never slackened off on my hatred of the Dodgers.  A group of athletically elite millionaire ball-players assembled out of free agency– how can anyone relate to such a team?

In order to acknowledge the Worst Financial Crisis since the Great Depression, and in order to evoke some nostalgia for past bad times, it may be time to implement a “Brother Can You Spare a Dime” program.  Simply put, if anyone comes up to you and literally asks “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?”, you hand over a dime.  It has to be those words, though.  The genius is that you should be able to recupriate the dime if necessary by asking someone (perhaps the same wise-ass who you just handed a dime) “Brother can you spare a dime?”

The “Undecided” voter is about the least likely to come up with penetrating questions.  This thought occured to me at when Brokaw relayed back to one of the “Undecided” voters to ask the question about why he should trust cynical political parties, and either candidate for breaking through highly charged partisanship.  This was not going to come up with any answer — I could script Obama and McCain’s answer right then and right there.  Simply put, they would have done better to farm that question slot out to a 9/11 Truthers Convention, who at least would throw something pointed and answerable.

As for the “debate” itself, John McCain pointing to Obama and saying “that one” will go down in history alongside Al Gore sighing.  And it probably put the final nail in his campaign’s coffin.

A while ago I learned a basic lesson, which is that living neo-nazis do not really like being referred to as “ghosts“.  It is understandable, I do suppose.  It appears that this guy, and not his ghost, was out in Peoria doing some campaigning.  For that cause.

Sadly, it seems that he probably could do worse than float around Sarah Palin rallies.  It seems that the media are being scooted away from interviewing Sarah Palin supporters, which is taking the tight control of Palin one step further.  I have heard some relatively goofy comments from Palin supporters — “She has five kids!  I have five kids!” — but those are no less sophisticated than comments from gatherings of any candidate.  Those are not the problem.  The problem, it seems, goes along the lines of:

In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric‘s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”

The Ghost of George Wallace appears to be in the air here. 

The Secret Service is following up on media reports today that someone in the crowd at a McCain/Palin event suggested killing Barack Obama, according to Secret Service spokesman Malcolm Wiley. The shout of “kill him” followed a Sarah Palin rant on Obama’s relationship with radical Chicagoan Bill Ayers.

It is unclear who the “kill him” is directed at — Obama or Ayers.  Which I guess would be the out in the meeting with the Secret Service.  Things are getting a tad heated here, and I have the basic feeling that this cannot end well — her particular brand of “Pit Bull with Lipstick” ensures that she fades back into Alaska, serves another term perhaps, and then fades away.  Assuming she doesn’t manage to say something over the line and have some sort of a “Macaca” Moment — which I tend to doubt — the audience that the press is not allowed to talk to is more likely to have that over-the-line ball of fire wrecking what is left of the McCain candidacy.

As for the Great Northwest, there is  This.  This.  Something else I can’t gather at this precise moment.  Not affiliated with the campaign, Palin wandering through North Florida and areas where the Confederate Flag might be waved, and those I suppose would exist whether or not Palin were alluding to Obama as a Coddler of Terrorism.

The number one movie in the nation is a movie called “Beverly Hills Chihahua”.

America never ceases to amaze me.

Please tell me this is some kind of gem.

Barack Obama is not seriously campaigning in Nebraska.  Googling around a little bit I found some reports that Kerry campaigners were contemplating making a play for the Omaha district.  They squelched that idea rather early, and that congressional district turned up a handful of percentage points ahead of the state for the Democratic candidate.  There might be a progression here in that it had always been a matter of pride for Nebraska conservatives and Republicans that Clinton did not appear in Nebraska until the last month of his presidency — and compare that to California where he made thinly disguised campaign appearances throughout his first term practically every week.  Nebraska now is worthy of a campaign head-fake — even though that lone electoral vote will only float Obama’s way in the event of a large landslide.

But as a head-fake and feign, it looks like it’s reasonably successful.  Sarah Palin made an appearance in Nebraska.  That is not quite as newsworthy as Palin finding her way to her role as a less dignified Spiro Agnew and what amounts to the fourth Hail Mary in Charles Krauthammer’s calculations — even if it is because Sarah Palin loves the “Nation’s Heartland”.   But even with this, it is probably worth trying to recall where Dan Quayle swooped about in 1992.  I think he poked his head in Yakima, actually.

Question: what Oregon Congress-critter changed their vote based on the $2 million toy arrow tax break, something which has become something of a national joke?

Apparently it was aimed at Peter Defazio, but that does not make too much sense — he became something of the erstwhile leader of the Liberal wing of the great fringe-conservative / fringe-liberal / Squishy embattled Center coalition against the Bailout Bill, and was not going to vote for the thing.

The tax break thus becomes something even more worrisome than a usual pork barrel attachment: it greased the wheels to allow passage of the bill, but greased it for nobody.

I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, “Hey, I think she just winked at me.” And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can’t be learned; it’s either something you have or you don’t, and man, she’s got it. — Rich Lowry.  Notable is the CNN “tracking” line of favorable / unfavorables in a group of “undecideds” from Ohio pushing a level around.  It was divided by men and women.  It is probably the basic partisan make-up of the genders, but the men’s response was higher with Palin and the women’s response was higher with Biden.  Apparently the men all thought she was winking right at them.

I heard parts of it on the radio, and saw parts of it on the television.  The effect was that I missed some Palin winks, and saw other Palin winks.  Listening to it, I was sorting through the Tina Fey skit.  Clearly the show could not pull off what it did on Saturday, which was to actually just pluck one exchange from the Katie Couric interview and re-enact it, with no exaggeration, to widespread laughter.  But, seeing the television, I see that Tina Fey is going to wink a bit.  Throw in the home-spun homilies to a “heartland” she does not really belong to and you have the makings of a parody, as opposed to a transcription passed off as a parody.

There is something surreal in the “Expectations Game”.  Going in the consensus had seemed to become that Sarah Palin would, indeed, “Exceed Expectations” — she has a political career behind her and has personal skills, and the rules of the “Debate” play to her strengths in allowing her to never be tied down to having to answer a question.  She can flow throw cue cards, toss in a couple wittisomes against Biden, and, most importantly, wink.  But what does it mean when everyone expects an “exceeding of expectations”, and for her to meet the expected exceeded expectations?

I want to siphon Biden into these comments, but there is nothing much to say.  By way of theater review, he transposed words a little, flubbed awkwardly a number of times, and if anyone were really paying attention to Biden in this “Theater Review” sector they might be a little surprised by some things that don’t really matter all that much but are usually played up in the media anyways.  There was no sizzle there, and that is how he won the debate.  The thing was an anti-climax because Palin’s status in the public mind has already been cemented — the downside of the so-called “Expectations Game” is nobody is going to forget what lead to the low expectations in the first place.  The poll numbers show an absurdly high percentage saying they thought Biden looked “presidential” — upper 80 percentile — and that is all Palin and all Biden resisting the urge to play the attack dog.  Palin was in color; Biden was in black and white — and we just have to be happy with that.  One thing about Biden, which seemed telling, was he kept referring not to people watching at home but to people listening on the radio.  I don’t know if this was wishful thinking so people would not notice his Left eyebrow, or if he was snake-bitten by the whole “FDR On the Television” mistake.

Yesterday the news came out that showed it is now difficult to see how McCain wins this election, or probably a bit more unfadingly Obama is on a clear glide to a victory.  McCain pulled his campaign staff out of Michigan.*  McCain’s collection of states he needs to pull through thus becomes impossibly (or nearly so) narrow.  Take the polls and add up the states where Obama leads by more than five percentage points, and he sits at 269 electoral votes, which is a tie which is a win.  The effect was that I listened and watched thinking more along the lines of the future of Sarah Palin.  My take was that if she fell down to the unexpected expectations nobody thought she would fall to, her national career was over.  If she passed the “Pass / Fail” test, she would be back, in four years, in eight years, who knows?  The difference is how able her constituency can convince themselves, and project outwards, that everything bad they’ve seen was an aberation.  In the respect her introduction on the national scene in 2008 and, subsequent disappearance, is like Q introducing John Luc Picard to the Borg on Star Trek.  A foreboding of the future, the Borg would be back.  I suppose Palin will be better groomed next time, whether in a presidential contest or into the Senate — better able to meld winks with nods with plausible answers on what she reads for information.  Also be a little more attentive and flexible in responding to opponent’s heart-broken story of a wife being killed in a car accident — it is sort of necessary when running as, in part, a “Mom in Chief”.

* On the other hand, McCain opened up an office in the more competitive district of Maine, which splits some electoral votes by district.  Obama countered by doing the same in the other Republican heavy split electoal vote state, opening up an office in Omaha, Nebraska.

Quick.  Name a Supreme Court Decision you disagree with.  Bush V Gore does not count. 

I can’t help but try to figure out how I would answer the questions which Palin flubbed in the Katie Couric interview.  (Is this thing being stretched out for maximum ratings or what?)  “What Supreme Court decisions do you oppose?”  “Um… that Imminent Domain decision… no, wait.  That one actually came out right.  Didn’t it?”  My ability to answer the Couric question would depend solely on my state of mind at the moment.   Naturally I expect more from a potential president, and the times and circumstances I’d allow one to go blank on such a question are close to nil, perhaps limited to shouting out the question as s/he is being chased in the Forest by a hungry Bear.

The one exception for this question, one that probably should come to mind with ease even when being chased by a hungry bear:  The Dred Scott Decision.   Perhaps Palin could not answer “Dred Scott” because it is a sort of fifth grade answer — Biden, for instance, provided an answer of a Supreme Court decision which struck down a law he wrote and passed — but it is better than nothing.  Further, it is a decision which politicians coming out from her socially conservative — read “pro-life politician” — milieu are trained to be chime in as a way of referencing “Roe v Wade” — supposedly a historical antecedent of a moral bankrupt culture that can think of some people as less than full peoples.  George W Bush, at one of the 2004 “Debates”, went off on a tangeant against Dred Scott for this purpose.  In that sense, even if it might have seemed a bit odd to some people, it would have been the right answer to some people. But, for whatever reason, she failed this basic Christian Conservative Politician test of being able to equate Dred Scott with Roe v Wade.