The election has taken a nasty turn. This is mainly the Republicans’ fault
Reuters
AS RECENTLY as a few months ago, it seemed possible to hope that this year’s presidential election would be a civilised affair. Barack Obama and John McCain both represent much that is best about their respective parties. Mr Obama is intelligent, inspiring and appears by instinct to be a consensus-seeking pragmatist. John McCain has always stood for limited, principled government, and has distanced himself throughout his career from the religious ideologues that have warped Republicanism. An intelligent debate about issues of the utmost importance—how America should rebuild its standing in the world, how more Americans could share in the proceeds of growth—seemed an attainable proposition.
It doesn’t seem so now. In the past two weeks, while banks have tottered and markets reeled, the contending Democrats and Republicans have squabbled and lied rather than debated. Mr McCain’s team has been nastier, accusing Mr Obama of sexism for calling the Republican vice-presidential candidate a pig, when he clearly did no such thing. Much nastier has been the assertion that Mr Obama once backed a bill that would give kindergarten children comprehensive sex education. Again, this was a distortion: the bill Mr Obama backed provided for age-appropriate sex education, and was intended to protect children from sex offenders.
These kinds of slurs seem much more personal, and therefore unpleasant, than the more routine distortions seen on both sides. Team McCain accuses Mr Obama of planning to raise taxes for middle-income Americans (in fact, the Democrat’s plan raises them only for those earning more than $250,000); Mr Obama claims Mr McCain wants to fight in Iraq for 100 years (when the Republican merely agreed that he would gladly keep bases there for that long to help preserve the peace, as in Germany) and caricatures him far too readily as a Bush toady (when Mr McCain’s record as an independent senator has been anything but that).
An issue of life and life
The decision to descend into tactics such as the kindergarten slur shows that America is back in the territory of the “culture wars”, where the battle will be less about policy than about values and moral character. That is partly because Mr Obama’s campaign, perhaps foolishly, chose to make such a big deal of the virtues of their candidate’s character. Most people are more concerned about the alarming state of the economy than anything else; yet the Democrats spent far more time in Denver talking about Mr Obama’s family than his economic policy. The Republicans leapt in, partly because they have a candidate with a still more heroic life story; partly because economics is not Mr McCain’s strongest suit and his fiscal plan is pretty similar to Mr Bush’s; but mostly because painting Mr Obama as an arrogant, elitist, east-coast liberal is an easy way of revving up the Republican Party’s base and what Richard Nixon called the “silent majority” (see article).
The decision to play this election, like that of 2004, as a fresh instalment of the culture wars is disappointing to those who thought Mr McCain was more principled than that. By choosing Sarah Palin as his running-mate he made a cynical tryst with a party base that he has never much liked and that has never much liked him. Mr McCain’s whole candidacy rests on his assertion that these are perilous times that require a strong and experienced commander-in-chief; but he has chosen, as the person who may be a 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency, someone who demonstrably knows very little about international affairs or the economy.
What Mrs Palin does do, as a committed pro-lifer, is to ensure that the evangelical wing of the Republican party will turn out in their multitudes. Mr McCain has thus placed abortion, the most divisive cultural issue in America, at the centre of his campaign. His defenders claim that it is too big an issue to be ignored, that he has always opposed abortion, that culture wars are an inevitable part of American elections, and that it was only when he appointed Mrs Palin that the American public started to listen to him. All this is true: but the old Mr McCain, who derided the religious right as “agents of intolerance”, would not have stooped to that.
A review of expenditures by the John McCain presidential campaign reveals several odd expenses that raise important questions about the candidate's efforts to bill himself as a populist and reformer - and point to possible Federal Election Campaign Act violations.
In July, the very month in which the odd expenses show up on McCain's financial disclosure report to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), McCain rolled out a new campaign slogan: "Reform - Prosperity - Peace."
The Wall Street Journal reported at the time "his new campaign ad is a biographical piece that stresses his campaign finance reform history."
However, despite several phone calls and e-mail queries to the McCain campaign headquarters by Narco News over the past couple weeks, and promises by his staffers that a response would be provided, no one from the McCain camp, to date, has offered an explanation for the following campaign expenditures registered on July 1 and 2 of this year, as reported to the FEC (link here).
Air Flights
Expenses dispersed July 1, 2008:
Thai Airways International: $741.80
British Airways: $1,549.15
Expenses dispersed July 2, 2008
Air Singapore: $7,335.42
British Airways: $2,690.56
Hotel Stays
Expenses dispersed July 2, 2008
Vinpers Resort Spa, Khanh Hoa Vietnam: $498.75
[Note: Khanh Hoa is a province of Vietnam; its capital is Nha Trang.]
Caravelle Hotel, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam: $539.87
Raffles Hotel, Singapore: $1,418.91
Also of note is a $160 expense dispersed on July 2, 2008, to the Department of State marked as a "travel" expense.
There is no record of John McCain making a campaign visit to Singapore or Vietnam during his presidential bid through July 2. Fox News reported on June 24 that McCain was scheduled to visit Colombia in early July [a trip he did make that coincided with the miraculous rescue of American hostages held by Colombia's leftist guerilla group the FARC]. McCain's campaign staff reports, according to Fox News, that as a candidate McCain has made prior overseas visits to Iraq, Kuwait, France, Germany, Switzerland, Pakistan, Jordan, Israel, the United Kingdom and Canada.
But, again, no mention of Vietnam or Singapore.
FEC regulations prohibit a candidate from paying for travel expenses out of campaign funds, according to Mary Brandenberger, an FEC spokesperson, if those expenses would not have existed "absent the campaign."
... Expenditures for travel relating to a Presidential or Vice Presidential candidate's campaign by any individual, including a candidate, shall, pursuant to the provisions of paragraph (b) of this section, be qualified campaign expenses and be reported by the candidate's authorized committee(s) as expenditures.
... If any campaign activity, other than incidental contacts, is conducted at a stop, that stop shall be considered campaign-related. Campaign activity includes soliciting, making, or accepting contributions, and expressly advocating the election or defeat of the candidate.
That wording would seem to provide the McCain camp with an out, if someone else did make a "campaign-related" visit to Vietnam and Singapore during the period in question.
Bob Biersack, another FEC spokesperson, says the information reported to his agency by candidates does not provide specific details about who actually incurred the expenses for a campaign. He says in the case of the Vietnam and Singapore expenditures, the most that can be discerned from the McCain campaign filings is that the airfare and hotel stays were paid for via a credit card.
For example, Biersack says the charge for the stay at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore "was included on an American Express payment dated 7/2/2008. The total amount of the credit card payment was $1,373,918" - which indicates the hotel stay was one among a host of charges covered by the campaign through a payment made on that card on July 2.
Biersack and Brandenberger both confirm that the only way for the FEC to get more information about the specific charges would be to conduct an audit of the McCain campaign's reported expenses, which would likely only be prompted through an official complaint to the FEC.
Possible Explanations
As odious as it might sound, one potential explanation for the expenditures, according to some sources, is that the McCain campaign sent investigators to Southeast Asia as part of an opposition research mission to dig up damaging information on rival candidate Barack Obama's childhood in Indonesia. Obama lived in Indonesia as a child from 1967 to 1971.
If that was the case, then it appears the trip expenses could legitimately be covered by the McCain campaign - and Singapore is only a short hop away from Indonesia. However, no expenses show up on the McCain FEC ledger involving Indonesia during the period under review.
In addition, the hotels involved in these expenditures are all upscale facilities. The Raffles Hotel in Singapore, for example, is an historic, popular destination for dignitaries and famous people. Among its notable past guests were pop star Michael Jackson, actress Elizabeth Taylor, former President George H. Bush and Queen Sofia of Spain.
It just doesn't seem like the kind of place where you would put up sweaty investigators on a campaign dirt-gathering mission. Besides, why would such an opposition research mission involve stays at fancy hotels in Vietnam?
However, there is one other plausible explanation for the expenses. From mid-June through the end of that month, John McCain's wife, Cindy, and her daughter Meghan, were both in Vietnam and Singapore as part of what the McCain camp billed at the time as a non-campaign "humanitarian" mission to help bring attention to the plight of poor children in Southeast Asia. Evidence that Cindy and Meghan McCain traveled to the regions (including Singapore) where the hotel stays were booked can be found on Meghan McCain's "non-campaign" blog at this link.
A June 10 Associated Press story describes the McCains' trip this way:
Cindy McCain ranged far afield from the U.S. presidential campaign trail Thursday to showcase her charity work helping Vietnamese kids born with facial deformities.
... She visited the coastal town of Nha Trang where about 100 children born with cleft palates and cleft lips were awaiting free plastic surgery provided by the U.S. charity Operation Smile. The operations will take place on one of the U.S. Navy's floating hospitals, the USNS Mercy.
"This is what I do, and this is what revitalizes me, personally," she said. "The campaign is extremely important, of course, but this is also important to me, and so you try to balance everything."
Cindy McCain's comments to the AP would seem to indicate that she was not on a campaign trip. That perception is reinforced by a June 19 report by the French news service AFP:
McCain's staff stressed that her visit [to Vietnam] was private and not related to the political campaign of her 71-year-old husband, the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party. She will also visit Thailand and Cambodia during her trip to Asia, on which she has been accompanied by Meghan, the couple's 23-year-old daughter.
And a June 13 advance story on Cindy McCain's trip by the Politico blog also leaves a similar impression of the h3umanitarian nature of the trip:
Cindy McCain will travel to three countries in Southeast Asia on a charitable mission next week, per a McCain aide.
The countries are not being disclosed for security reasons, but McCain is to spend a week in the region, with the first portion of the trip alongside other members of Operation Smile, the organization that provides facial reconstruction to children. She'll then travel with officials from the World Food Program.
Politico points out that Cindy McCain serves on the board of Operation Smile.
However, Cindy McCain did garner a lot of press during her visit to Southeast Asia that projects conflicting images of the purpose of her journey.
In an interview with CNN, she addressed issues related to the presidential campaign in a clear effort to bolster her husband's image. By contrast, in a segment she did for ABC's Good Morning America, Cindy McCain appears to paint her work in Southeast Asia as a humanitarian mission undertaken because of her deep concern about the plight of poor Third World children.
CNN Interview
ABC Interview
Prior to flying back to the United States, Cindy McCain and her daughter made a stopover in London, where Cindy co-hosted with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger a fundraiser for the McCain Campaign on June 26 - an event expected to raise some $500,000 for her husband's campaign, according to an MSNBC report. No hotel expenses show up on the McCain campaign's FEC report for that London visit. However, two expenses that do appear to be related are a $14,662 payment on June 16 to London-based Frances Prenn, a fundraising specialist; and a $5,379 payment on June 2 to London-based The Wren Press Ltd., which prints party invitations.
So, given the London fundraising effort and the CNN interview, it appears that the Vietnam- and Singapore-related airfare and hotel expenses, if they are attributable to Cindy McCain, might well qualify as campaign-related expenses - depending on how far the FEC is willing to stretch its rules.
But if that is the case, then both the media and the public were sold a bill of goods when Cindy McCain tried to pass off her trip to Southeast Asia as a mission of the heart to help bring attention to the plight of poor children. Rather, it would seem, in such a case, that those children were used as little more than props to advance the McCain campaign's agenda - one in which Cindy McCain slummed it by day for the bright lights of the TV cameras to bolster her husband's campaign and by night basked in the luxury of upscale hotels.
But we cannot know for certain what really happened, unless, and until, the McCain campaign provides the specific details of why the Vietnam and Singapore expenses show up on its campaign expenditure ledger.
Reform Hypocrisy
The Southeast Asia mystery doesn't represent the first time that the McCain campaign has come under scrutiny for allegedly playing fast and lose with campaign finance rules with respect to foreign visits - which seems to run counter to the candidate's claims of being a reformer and populist.
In March 2008, John McCain held a fundraiser in London that came under scrutiny by a conservative public interest group.
From an April 24 press release issued by the group, called Judicial Watch:
Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it filed a formal complaint, dated April 22, 2008, with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) related to a fundraising luncheon held at London's Spencer House to benefit Senator John McCain's presidential campaign. The venue for the event was apparently donated to the campaign by foreign nationals, in violation of federal campaign finance laws.
FEC campaign finance records reflect that the McCain campaign made a $55,377 payment to Spencer House on May 5, within two weeks of Judicial Watch's complaint.
Likewise, the Democratic National Committee cried foul over a McCain visit to Ottawa, Canada, in late June - a trip that occurred at the same time his wife was touring Southeast Asia on her "humanitarian" mission.
The Democratic National Committee today filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the U.S. Department of State seeking information about possible violations of the Hatch Act in connection to John McCain's events in Ottawa today. The FOIA request follows reports that McCain campaign officials requested assistance in arranging a $100-a-plate luncheon speech from U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins.
The McCain camp responded to the allegations, as follows, according to a June 19 Washington Post report:
A McCain spokesman said that while the campaign pays travel costs for the trip, the luncheon, held by the Economic Club of Canada, is not a fundraiser and not a campaign event. He said the $100-per-person ticket price for the event is to cover the cost of the lunch and will not benefit the campaign.
"It's not a fundraiser. That's to pay for their own lunch. That is not for campaign coffers," Brian Rogers said. "The Ottawa speech is not in our view a campaign-related event. Thus, anything related to that is not political."
So it seems not all is as it seems in the land of campaign image building.
In the future, it might be wise for all members of the press (and the public) to cut to the chase of these apparent hypocrisies by demanding to know, as a precondition of any press coverage, where the line is between campaign hype and authenticity. And it seems that following the money is the only way to get at that truth.
And absent transparency by the campaigns themselves, it also appears that money trail remains obscured. The FEC, it seems, doesn't keep those kinds of records - despite the much-vaunted campaign finance reform that one candidate in this election points to as evidence of his populist reformer credentials.
GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, in Michigan. A quip on reading terrorists their rights was a taunt on basic fairness.
By Mark Bowden
In the weeks since John McCain introduced Sarah Palin as his running mate, she has become one of the most famous people in America.
She has been cunningly impersonated on Saturday Night Live by her look-alike Tina Fey, grilled by ABC's sober anchor Charlie Gibson, and investigated by teams of reporters who by now have hunted down every person in Alaska with a grudge or criticism.
We discovered that her teenage daughter is pregnant and watched as the hockey-playing lad who knocked her up was rapidly betrothed, cleaned up and hauled wide-eyed into the national spotlight with his soon-to-be in-laws - a bracingly modern variation of the old shotgun wedding. We have learned that Palin, like just about every other politician in human history, tends to hire her friends and fire her enemies.
We will learn more, but none of the above has done much to alter her image as a refreshingly independent, aggressive, smart, down-to-earth, and surprisingly effective public official. And we all know she can give a good speech.
But it was in that much-heralded speech at the Republican convention that Palin tossed off a line I found more disturbing than anything unearthed about her since. It got a predictably enthusiastic response from the keyed-up partisan crowd.
"Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America," said Palin, and then, referring to Barack Obama, quipped: "He's worried that someone won't read them their rights."
Quite apart from the cheap distortion of Obama's position, typical of most campaign rhetoric, this is a classic lynch-mob line. It is the taunt of the drunken lout in the cowboy movie who confronts a sheriff barring the prison door - He wants to give 'im a trial? It is the precise sentiment that Atticus Finch so memorably sets himself against in Harper Lee's masterpiece To Kill a Mockingbird, when he agrees to defend a supposedly indefensible black man charged with rape (falsely, as it turns out).
I wonder if Palin really believes her own position on this. I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it was just a speechwriter's idea of a great applause line, perhaps she hasn't fully thought it through. The sentiment is on the wrong side of a deep principle, one that we have long honored in this country, that has to do with basic fairness, the rule of law, and ultimately with standing up intelligently to terrorism.
Palin's comments referred to McCain's condemnation of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling this summer that upheld detainees' rights to the most basic of legal protections against arrest and imprisonment, a habeas corpus petition. The court ruled that our government cannot just call someone a terrorist, arrest him, and hold him indefinitely without showing some reasonable cause. McCain has called this "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country." Obama has praised it.
The court's decision is just the latest word in an evolving national discussion of what to do with captured "terrorists." Congress and the White House have been wrestling with this since Sept. 11, 2001, and will continue to do so. Even those who applauded the court's defense of habeas corpus are not so sure that federal courts are the right place for "enemy combatants" to appeal their detention. And among those who side with the court, few would argue that enemy combatants are owed the full legal protections enjoyed by citizens. But certainly anyone arrested and locked away deserves the chance to challenge their arrest.
Mind you, we are not talking about a trial here, just a hearing to establish that there is enough evidence to lock the suspect away.
Palin's applause line applied the lynch-mob standard: Because a man has been arrested, he is guilty. End of story.
In 2003, when the first group of prisoners was released from Guantanamo, I traveled to Pakistan to find two of them, Shah Muhammad and Sahibzada Osman Ali. Both hailed from tiny villages in the mountainous region of Pakistan where al-Qaeda and the Taliban have been hiding. As an American, I was nervous traveling in that region, and honestly didn't know what to expect when I found them.
I was greeted with warmth and elaborate courtesy. Both were men in their early 20s, uneducated, unworldly, and dirt poor. They had been rounded up by entrepreneurial Afghani warlords who were being paid $4,000 a head to capture jihadis for the Americans. Four thousand dollars is a huge payday in Afghanistan, and the warlords were not discriminating. Both apparently hapless young Pakistanis were among the original herds of elaborately restrained detainees in orange jumpsuits delivered to Camp X-Ray, the ones who were all treated like mass murderers. Some of them were. Many, it turns out, were not.
Shah Muhammad and Sahibzada Osman Ali were held for almost two years before the authorities figured out that they did not pose a threat to Western civilization.
Maybe the authorities and I both have it wrong. Perhaps these two are huddling right now with Osama bin Laden himself, but they have stood in my mind ever since as examples of why detainees deserve a hearing of some kind, whether in federal court or before some panel that is seen to be fair and reasonably concerned about basic justice.
We are at war against forces who seek a permanent state of fear, for whom violence is an end in itself. Our side of the fight defends government by consent, and the rule of law. It is why we fight, and what makes our use of violence against our enemies morally defensible. This is why it is critical that we respect individual rights and act lawfully.
That does not mean reading Miranda warnings to enemy combatants, as Palin glibly suggested, or affording them the full battery of rights given criminal defendants in this country. It does mean that even those accused of the most vile crimes have some.
The National Journalpolled five states that voted for President Bush four years ago -- Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, Ohio and Virginia -- and found that less than 40% of voters in those states (except for New Mexico) believe that Sen. Barack Obama is more prepared to be president than Sen. John McCain.
In a political environment not generally friendly to Republicans, McCain's biggest advantage over Obama has been his perceived readiness to be president. He hammered away at this message all summer and kept the race reasonably close.
However, when McCain picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate -- a person just two years removed from being mayor of a town with fewer people than the Fenway Park bleachers -- he essentially gave up experience as a campaign issue. It's hard to argue that Obama is inexperienced when McCain's choice to be just a heartbeat away from the presidency has even less experience.
As the pollsters note, it's hard to see how Obama can get to 270 electoral votes without picking up at least one of these five states. However, it's equally hard to see how McCain can win all of these states without using the experience issue. By choosing Palin -- and giving up that issue -- McCain dramatically hurt his chances of winning the election.
The skit accurately roasts McCain's willingness to sacrifice his last shred of decency to win an election using ridiculous and specious attack ads. It even throws in this likely McCain ad: "Barack Obama fathered TWO black children IN WEDLOCK." The skit also touches on McCain-spawned gems such as his membership in a deregulating, modern-day Luddite movement ("Digitally? With your fingers?").
Despite barely a mention of Palin, McCain's campaign will undoubtedly decry the skit as sexist. Whine all you want, Steve Schmidt, but once SNL reduces your tactics to a parody, it's probably a smart cue to try something else.
Al Franken, the former "Saturday Night Live" star now running in a high-profile Senate race in Minnesota, helped craft the opening sketch mocking John McCain that kicked off the NBC comedy show Saturday, according to two well-placed sources inside the network...
Franken, who hasn’t been a staff writer on the show for 13 years, "phoned in" a spoof of McCain recording campaign ads in an edit booth, said an NBC source. Seth Meyers, the show’s current head writer, wrote it, but the sketch was hatched by Franken, a longtime liberal satirist and comedian...
A Franken campaign aide said the candidate had been taping an ad earlier in the week and had wondered out loud how McCain could include the disclaimer candidates are required to include in their commercials — "I’m John McCain, and I approved this message" — when his spots were so "over the top."
Why do most of us send our credit-card bills to South Dakota or Delaware? The answer to that seemingly arcane question illustrates the dangers of replacing state regulation with no regulation at all. It also offers a cautionary tale about a little-understood provision at the center of John McCain's health care plan. So bear with me for a little history.
Until the late 1970s, South Dakota and Delaware didn't have an outsized share of the credit-card business. Banks had to obey the interest caps of the states where borrowers lived. So, for example, loans to New York residents were always subject to New York's limits on interest rates. At 12 percent back then, and with high inflation, these laws sharply limited profits on credit cards.
Then in 1978, the Supreme Court said banks should follow the rate cap in their home states. This meant that as long as a credit-card company relocated to a state with a higher interest-rate limit, the company could lend to borrowers anywhere under that higher limit. Following the court's ruling, Citibank chairman Walter Wriston offered Gov. Bill Janklow a deal: If South Dakota lifted its rate cap altogether and formally invited Citibank to the state (as federal law required), the banking giant would move its credit-card operations to South Dakota—along with 400 good jobs.
The bill was introduced and passed in the space of a day. Soon after, Delaware lifted its cap, too. Voilà, South Dakota and Delaware became the hosts of most credit-card companies. And with the help of another 1996 Supreme Court decision, credit-card companies could charge what they wanted.
The centerpiece of McCain's plan, as reporting in the New York Times has noted, would eliminate the special tax treatment of employer-provided health care and instead offer tax credits to everybody who pays premiums. In a less-noticed move, McCain also proposes to change the market for health insurance that people buy on an individual basis—he says that "families should be able to purchase health insurance nationwide, across state lines." That would be a big change. Today, insurance companies need to follow the laws of the states where they sell individual insurance plans, just as credit-card companies did before 1978. If an insurer wants to sell policies in New York, the insurer has to obey New York's laws. Many states pretty much let companies sell the policies they wish, but others set a floor of protections. New York laws, for example, require that companies issue coverage to all new customers and not set higher rates for people who are already sick. As Stephanie Lewis points out in a forthcoming paper for the Center for American Progress, 17 other states impose at least some similar regulations. These rules may increase premiums for healthy folks, but they also give people with pre-existing conditions a decent chance to afford health insurance in the market for individually purchased policies.
McCain argues that different states' regulations "prevent the best companies, with the best plans and lowest prices, from making their product available to any American who wants it." Although he hasn't given details, his supporters saythathe favors an approach, endorsed by President Bush and championed by McCain's Arizona colleague John Shadegg, that would allow insurers to choose the state laws under which they are regulated. (I e-mailed the campaign about the specifics of McCain's approach and didn't hear back.) An insurance company that chose to be regulated under Arizona law could sell policies in New York without following New York rules. Arizona, like most states, lets companies charge what they want to people who are sick—or simply deny them coverage altogether. Under Shadegg's bill, insurers wouldn't even need to pick up and move their operations; it would be enough to file some paperwork with a state insurance commissioner and pay that state's relevant taxes.
If enacted, this proposal would cause a shift along the lines seen in the credit-card industry. Like the Citibank of old, New York insurers would have little incentive to continue doing business under New York's laws. Insurance companies can make bigger profits by offering different policies to different people based on separate assessments of risk rather than charging everyone the same, as a state like New York requires. An insurer operating under Arizona law would be able to offer healthy New Yorkers a cheaper policy than an insurer working under New York law that has to price policies the same for everyone.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing? In the credit-card industry, there's a pretty decent argument that the old usury laws restricted access to credit, even among people who needed it and could use it well. And competition among card issuers has led to a proliferation of rewards programs—frequent-flyer miles, hotel discounts—that work nicely for people who pay their bills in full and on time. There's also a classic libertarian argument for deregulating credit cards: MasterCard never put a gun to anybody's head.
The problem is that without consumer protections, companies use pricing practices, like teaser rates, to attract cash-strapped families and then slap those families with interest rates of 35 percent or higher plus penalties of $35 a month. Rates can double or triple without notice, even if you never miss a payment. Credit-card use and bankruptcy rose together for years (until the 2005 federal bankruptcy legislation), and last year, banks made $40 billion in plastic profits. For families drowning in debt (often from health expenses, by the way), a credit card may be the only life raft—but in the memorable words of Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi, authors of The Two-Income Trap, the raft turns out to be made of cement.
With the individual market for health care, the libertarian argument fails on its own terms: Sick people can't get coverage they can afford. It's as though the rafts are reserved for people who already have life preservers. Americans with pre-existing conditions—cancer, asthma, diabetes, and the like—would need to pay even more than they do today. Through no fault of their own, more of them would end up without insurance. Meanwhile, insurers would improve their own profits by offering targeted policies to people with the fewest health expenses. As with the history of credit cards, it's Robin Hood in reverse. Apart from the obvious injustice, this approach could add to spiraling health costs. The sickest 10 percent of Americans are already responsible for 70 percent of the nation's health expenses. When more such Americans go uninsured, skip checkups, and land in the emergency room, they end up costing taxpayers more.
In a national economy, there's often a good argument for standardizing rules across state lines. Smart reforms of the credit-card industry wouldn't reinstate the old regime of state regulations; they'd provide national protections against practices like raising rates for people who are paying their bills on time. In health care, federal law already sets a very low floor of protections for individuals who lose coverage. But many people don't benefit, because they don't already have coverage, don't qualify, or can't afford their new premiums. Sensible reforms in the market for individually purchased health insurance would apply New York-style rules nationally and then do more to bring down average costs: bringing small businesses into risk pools with individuals, using mandates or automatic enrollment to expand those pools, and deploying tax subsidies to make coverage more affordable.
What makes no sense is to neuter state regulations while putting nothing in their place. That will leave the sickest people, who drive the sickness of our health system, in more trouble than then are in now. Letting South Dakota regulate America's credit-card industry hasn't worked out so well. Letting Arizona do the same for health insurance would be worse.
By FRANK RICH NOT until 2004 could the 9/11 commission at last reveal the title of the intelligence briefing President Bush ignored on Aug. 6, 2001, in Crawford: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” No wonder John McCain called for a new “9/11 commission” to “get to the bottom” of 9/14, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers set off another kind of blood bath in Lower Manhattan. Put a slo-mo Beltway panel in charge, and Election Day will be ancient history before we get to the bottom of just how little he and the president did to defend America against a devastating new threat on their watch.
For better or worse, the candidacy of Barack Obama, a senator-come-lately, must be evaluated on his judgment, ideas and potential to lead. McCain, by contrast, has been chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he claims to have overseen “every part of our economy.” He didn’t, thank heavens, but he does have a long and relevant economic record that begins with the Keating Five scandal of 1989 and extends to this campaign, where his fiscal policies bear the fingerprints of Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina. It’s not the résumé that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That’s why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice.
McCain has largely pulled it off so far, under the guidance of Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protégé. A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness. All campaigns, Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.
When a McCain spokesman told Politico a week ago that “we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say” about the campaign’s incessant fictions, he was channeling a famous Bush dictum of 2003: “Somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter.” In Bush’s case, the lies lobbed over the heads of the press were to sell the war in Iraq. That propaganda blitz, devised by a secret White House Iraq Group that included Rove, was a triumph. In mere months, Americans came to believe that Saddam Hussein had aided the 9/11 attacks and even that Iraqis were among the hijackers. A largely cowed press failed to set the record straight.
Just as the Bushies once flogged uranium from Africa, so Palin ceaselessly repeats her discredited claim that she said “no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. Nothing is too small or sacred for the McCain campaign to lie about. It was even caught (by The Christian Science Monitor) peddling an imaginary encounter between Cindy McCain and Mother Teresa when McCain was adopting her daughter in Bangladesh.
If you doubt that the big lies are sticking, look at the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. Half of voters now believe in the daily McCain refrain that Obama will raise their taxes. In fact, Obama proposes raising taxes only on the 1.9 percent of households that make more than $250,000 a year and cutting them for nearly everyone else.
You know the press is impotent at unmasking this truthiness when the hardest-hitting interrogation McCain has yet faced on television came on “The View.” Barbara Walters and Joy Behar called him on several falsehoods, including his endlessly repeated fantasy that Palin opposed earmarks for Alaska. Behar used the word “lies” to his face. The McCains are so used to deference from “the filter” that Cindy McCain later complained that “The View” picked “our bones clean.” In our news culture, Behar, a stand-up comic by profession, looms as the new Edward R. Murrow.
Network news, with its dwindling handful of investigative reporters, has barely mentioned, let alone advanced, major new print revelations about Cindy McCain’s drug-addiction history (in The Washington Post) and the rampant cronyism and secrecy in Palin’s governance of Alaska (in last Sunday’s New York Times). At least the networks repeatedly fact-check the low-hanging fruit among the countless Palin lies, but John McCain’s past usually remains off limits.
That’s strange since the indisputable historical antecedent for our current crisis is the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal of the go-go 1980s. When Charles Keating’s bank went belly up because of risky, unregulated investments, it wiped out its depositors’ savings and cost taxpayers more than $3 billion. More than 1,000 other S.&L. institutions capsized nationwide.
It was ugly for the McCains. He had received more than $100,000 in Keating campaign contributions, and both McCains had repeatedly hopped on Keating’s corporate jet. Cindy McCain and her beer-magnate father had invested nearly $360,000 in a Keating shopping center a year before her husband joined four senators in inappropriate meetings with regulators charged with S.&L. oversight.
After Congressional hearings, McCain was reprimanded for “poor judgment.” He had committed no crime and had not intervened to protect Keating from ruin. Yet he, like many deregulators in his party, was guilty of bankrupt policy-making before disaster struck. He was among the sponsors of a House resolution calling for the delay of regulations intended to deter risky investments just like those that brought down Lincoln and its ilk.
Ever since, McCain has publicly thrashed himself for his mistakes back then — and boasted of the lessons he learned. He embraced campaign finance reform to rebrand himself as a “maverick.” But whatever lessons he learned are now forgotten.
For all his fiery calls last week for a Wall Street crackdown, McCain opposed the very regulations that might have helped avert the current catastrophe. In 1999, he supported a law co-authored by Gramm (and ultimately signed by Bill Clinton) that revoked theNew Deal reforms intended to prevent commercial banks, insurance companies and investment banks from mingling their businesses. Equally laughable is the McCain-Palin ticket’s born-again outrage over the greed of Wall Street C.E.O.’s. When McCain’s chief financial surrogate, Fiorina, was fired as Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive after a 50 percent drop in shareholders’ value and 20,000 pink slips, she took home a package worth $42 million.
The McCain campaign canceled Fiorina’s television appearances last week after she inadvertently admitted that Palin was unqualified to run a corporation. But that doesn’t mean Fiorina is gone. Gramm, too, was ostentatiouslyexiled after he blamed the economic meltdown on our “nation of whiners” and “mental recession,” but he remains in the McCain loop.
The corporate jets, lobbyists and sleazes that gravitated around McCain in the Keating era have also reappeared in new incarnations. The Nation’s Web site recently unearthed a photo of the resolutely anticelebrity McCain being greeted by the con man Raffaello Follieri and his then girlfriend, the Hollywood actress Anne Hathaway, as McCain celebrated his 70th birthday on Follieri’s rented yacht in Montenegro in August 2006. It’s the perfect bookend to the old pictures of McCain in a funny hat partying with Keating in the Bahamas.
Whatever blanks are yet to be filled in on Obama, we at least know his economic plans and the known quantities who are shaping them (Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin, Paul Volcker). McCain has reversed himself on every single economic issue this year, often within a 24-hour period, whether he’s judging the strength of the economy’s fundamentals or the wisdom of the government bailout of A.I.G. He once promised that he’d run every decision past Alan Greenspan — and even have him write a new tax code — but Greenspan has jumped ship rather than support McCain’s biggest flip-flop, his expansion of the Bush tax cuts. McCain’s official chief economic adviser is now Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who last week declared that McCain had “helped create” the BlackBerry.
But Holtz-Eakin’s most telling statement was about McCain’s economic plans — namely, that the details are irrelevant. “I don’t think it’s imperative at this moment to write down what the plan should be,” he said. “The real issue here is a leadership issue.” This, too, is a Rove-Bush replay. We want a tough guy who will “fix” things with his own two hands — let’s take out the S.E.C. chairman! — instead of wimpy Frenchified Democrats who just “talk.” The fine print of policy is superfluous if there’s a quick-draw decider in the White House.
The twin-pronged strategy of truculence and propaganda that sold Bush and his war could yet work for McCain. Even now his campaign has kept the “filter” from learning the very basics about his fitness to serve as president — his finances and his health. The McCain multihousehold’s multimillion-dollar mother lode is buried in Cindy McCain’s still-unreleased complete tax returns. John McCain’s full medical records, our sole index to the odds of an imminent Palin presidency, also remain locked away. The McCain campaign instead invited 20 chosen reporters to speed-read through 1,173 pages of medical history for a mere three hours on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. No photocopying was permitted.
This is the same tactic of selective document release that the Bush White House used to bamboozle Congress and the press about Saddam’s nonexistent W.M.D. As truthiness repeats itself, so may history, and not as farce.
ANCHORAGE — In case trooper-gate’s not enough, Gov. Sarah Palin, the GOP vice presidential nominee, has another investigation on her plate.
The police officers union in Alaska has filed a complaint on behalf of Mike Wooten, a state trooper and Palin’s former brother-in-law, who Palin is accused of trying to oust over a long-time family feud. Since being tapped for the veep spot, Palin has lawyered up and is no longer cooperating in the investigation.
The complaint alleges that the governor or her staff may have have improperly disclosed information from Wooten’s personnel records. The complaint alleges “criminal penalties may apply.”
John Cyr, director of the union that filed the complaint, told NBC News, “It seems obvious to us somebody has improperly accessed [Wooten's] personnel file.”
The complaint alleges that a phone recording in which Palin aide Frank Bailey pressures Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan to push out Wooten shows that his file was misused. Palin’s campaign responds saying that Palin’s husband, Todd Palin, gave Bailey the information, all of which first appeared in public divorce records.
Obama has the advantage in Michigan, according to a new CNN poll of polls.
(CNN) – An average of the latest polls in Michigan shows why the state continues to be a battleground in the fight for the presidency.
A new CNN poll of polls in Michigan, compiled Saturday, suggests Senator Barack Obama has a five point lead over Senator John McCain, 47 percent to 42 percent, with 11 percent of voters undecided.
Seventeen electoral votes are up for grabs in Michigan.
It seems the current financial crisis from Wall Street to Main Street will be a major factor in Michigan.
"The struggling economy could be Obama's trump card," noted CNN Senior Political Researcher Alan Silverleib. "Obama is doing slightly better in our Michigan poll of polls than in our national poll of polls in large part because Michigan is ground zero when it comes to the country's current economic hardship. The unsettling news from Wall Street over the last few days should play to Obama's advantage, especially in the Rust Belt."
Michigan's voted for the Democratic candidate in the last four presidential elections, but it was quite close last time around, with Senator John Kerry beating President Bush there by just three points.
The latest CNN poll of polls is an average of the three most recent surveys in Michigan. They are a Big Ten Batttleground poll conducted September 14-17, an EPIC/MRA survey taken on the same days, and a Marist poll conducted September 16-17.
UPDATE: The release of new ARG numbers this afternoon has tightened up the Michigan average by one point. Obama now leads McCain in the Michigan poll of polls by 4 points (47 to 43 percent). This morning's Michigan poll of polls showed Obama leading McCain by 5 points (47 to 42 percent).
Here’s a sad monument to the sleaziness of this presidential campaign: Almost one-third of voters “know” that Barack Obama is a Muslim or believe that he could be.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Nicholas D. Kristof
In short, the political campaign to transform Mr. Obama into a Muslim is succeeding. The real loser as that happens isn’t just Mr. Obama, but our entire political process.
A Pew Research Center survey released a few days ago found that only half of Americans correctly know that Mr. Obama is a Christian. Meanwhile, 13 percent of registered voters say that he is a Muslim, compared with 12 percent in June and 10 percent in March.
More ominously, a rising share — now 16 percent — say they aren’t sure about his religion because they’ve heard “different things” about it.
When I’ve traveled around the country, particularly to my childhood home in rural Oregon, I’ve been struck by the number of people who ask something like: That Obama — is he really a Christian? Isn’t he a Muslim or something? Didn’t he take his oath of office on the Koran?
In conservative Christian circles and on Christian radio stations, there are even widespread theories that Mr. Obama just may be the Antichrist. Seriously.
John Green, of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, says that about 10 percent of Americans believe we may be in the Book of Revelation’s “end times” and are on the lookout for the Antichrist. A constant barrage of e-mail and broadcasts suggest that Mr. Obama just may be it.
The online Red State Shop sells T-shirts, mugs and stickers exploiting the idea. Some shirts and stickers portray a large “O” with horns, above a caption: “The Anti-Christ.”
To his credit, Mr. McCain himself has never raised doubts about Mr. Obama’s religion. But a McCain commercial last month mimicked the words and imagery of the best-selling Christian “Left Behind” book series in ways that would have set off alarm bells among evangelicals nervous about the Antichrist.
Mr. McCain himself is not popular with evangelicals. But they will vote for him if they think the other guy may be on Satan’s side.
In fact, of course, Mr. Obama took his oath on the Bible, not — as the rumors have it — on the Koran. He is far more active in church than John McCain is.
(Just imagine for a moment if it were the black candidate in this election, rather than the white candidate, who was born in Central America, was an indifferent churchgoer, had graduated near the bottom of his university class, had dumped his first wife, had regularly displayed an explosive and profane temper, and had referred to the Pakistani-Iraqi border ...)
What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian.
The result is this campaign to “otherize” Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him.
Raising doubts about a candidate based on the religion of his grandfather is toxic and profoundly un-American, cracking the melting pot we emerged from. Someday people will look back at the innuendoes about Mr. Obama with the same disgust with which we regard the smears of Al Smith as a Catholic candidate in 1928.
I’m writing in part out of a sense of personal responsibility. Those who suggest that Mr. Obama is a Muslim — as if that in itself were wrong — regularly cite my own columns, especially an interview last year in which I asked him about Islam and his boyhood in Indonesia. In that interview, Mr. Obama praised the Arabic call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on earth at sunset,” and he repeated the opening of it.
This should surprise no one: the call to prayer blasts from mosque loudspeakers five times a day, and Mr. Obama would have had to have been deaf not to learn the words as a child. But critics, like Jerome Corsi, whose book denouncing Mr. Obama, “The Obama Nation,” is No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list, quote from that column to argue that Mr. Obama has mysterious ties to Islam. I feel a particular obligation not to let my own writing be twisted so as to inflame bigotry and xenophobia.
Journalists need to do more than call the play-by-play this election cycle. We also need to blow the whistle on such egregious fouls calculated to undermine the political process and magnify the ugliest prejudices that our nation has done so much to overcome.
For John McCain, the panel discussion on This Week with George Stephanopoulos could not have been more brutal.
Minutes after conservative columnist George Will declared that the Senator was decidedly un-presidential is his unexpected call for the firing of SEC Chairman Chris Cox, Sam Donaldson, the long-time ABC hand, said that McCain's erratic message on the economy again raised questions about his age.
"I suppose the McCain campaign's hope is that when there's a big crisis, people will go for age and experience," said Will. "The question is, who in this crisis looked more presidential, calm and un-flustered? It wasn't John McCain who, as usual, substituting vehemence for coherence, said 'let's fire somebody.' And picked one of the most experienced and conservative people in the administration, Chris Cox, and for no apparent reason... It was un-presidential behavior by a presidential candidate."
Donaldson then jumped in: "It was two days after the he said the fundamentals of the economy were strong. His talking points have gotten all mixed up. And I think the question of age is back on the table."
It should be noted that McCain's call for the firing of Cox was dismissed right off the bat, as the president does not have the authority to axe an SEC chairman. The criticisms that Donaldson raised concerned the fact that McCain started the week by touting the fundamentals of the economy, before pivoting into fits of populist mantra and calling for increased regulation of the markets - position at odds with McCain's traditional economic philosophies.
"When I say age," he explained, "I don't know the difference between finding your talking points and not delivering the right ones, we have seen him do this frequently but this last week was the worst. Between two stops in Florida, as you say, he had to revise his thinking about what he wanted to say about the economy, wanted to feel the pain suddenly than say everything is great."
The whole, painful, episode crested with Will leveling an even harsher blow.
"John McCain showed his personality this week," said the writer and pundit, "and made some of us fearful."
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A federal judge on Saturday ordered Dick Cheney to preserve a wide range of the records from his time as vice president.
Dick Cheney and the Bush administration were sued to ensure that presidential records are not destroyed.
The decision by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly is a setback for the Bush administration in its effort to promote a narrow definition of materials that must be safeguarded under by the Presidential Records Act.
The Bush administration's legal position "heightens the court's concern" that some records may not be preserved, said the judge.
A private group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, is suing Cheney and the Executive Office of the President in an effort to ensure that no presidential records are destroyed or handled in a way that makes them unavailable to the public.
In a 22-page opinion, the judge revealed that in recent days, lawyers for the Bush administration balked at a proposed agreement between the two sides on how to proceed with the case.
Cheney and the other defendants in the case "were only willing to agree to a preservation order that tracked their narrowed interpretation" of the Presidential Records Act, wrote Kollar-Kotelly.
The administration, said the judge, wanted any court order on what records are at issue in the case to cover only the office of the vice president, not Cheney or the other defendants in the lawsuit.
The other defendants are the Executive Office of the President and the National Archives.
The lawsuit stems from Cheney's position that his office is not part of the executive branch of government.
This summer, Cheney chief of staff David Addington told Congress that the vice president belongs to neither the executive nor legislative branch of government but rather is attached by the Constitution to Congress. The vice president presides over the Senate.
The lawsuit alleges that the Bush administration's actions over the past 7½ years raise questions over whether the White House will turn over records created by Cheney and his staff to the National Archives in January.
In 2003, Cheney asserted that the office of the vice president is not an entity within the executive branch.
Two historians and three groups of historians and archivists joined CREW in filing the suit two weeks ago.
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