A Campaign Based on Triviality

The Post looks at the quickly deteriorating civility and seriousness of the McCain-Palin campaign:

It's hard to think of a presidential campaign with a wider chasm between the seriousness of the issues confronting the country and the triviality, so far anyway, of the political discourse. On a day when the Congressional Budget Office warned of looming deficits and a grim economic outlook, when the stock market faltered even in the wake of the government's rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, when President Bush discussed the road ahead in Iraq and Afghanistan, on what did the campaign of Sen. John McCain spend its energy? A conference call to denounce Sen. Barack Obama for using the phrase "lipstick on a pig" and a new television ad accusing the Democrat of wanting to teach kindergartners about sex before they learn to read.

Mr. Obama's supposedly offending remark was not only not offensive -- it also was not directed at Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. "The other side, suddenly, they're saying 'we're for change too,' " Mr. Obama said. "You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig." With a woman on the ticket, apparently all references to cosmetics -- or pork of the non-bridge variety, for that matter -- are forbidden. "Sen. Obama owes Gov. Palin an apology," sniffed former Massachusetts governor Jane Swift. "Calling a very prominent female governor of one of our states a pig is not exactly what we want to see." No matter that Mr. McCain used the lipstick-on-a-pig phrase himself, referring to (female) Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's health-care plan, or that (female) former McCain aide Torie Clarke wrote a book with that title. In the heat of a campaign, operatives will pounce on any misstep and play to the referees over any arguable foul. We understand that, and certainly the Obama campaign has not been above such tactics. But this cynical use of the gender card is unusually silly.

The kindergarten sex ad, exhuming an argument that Republican Alan Keyes
used against Mr. Obama in his 2004 Senate race, was equally ridiculous. "Obama's
one accomplishment?" the narrator asks. "Legislation to teach 'comprehensive sex education' -- to kindergartners. Learning about sex before learning to read? Barack Obama: wrong on education. Wrong for your family." As a state senator, Mr. Obama voted for -- though he did not sponsor -- a measure that set out standards for non-mandatory sex and health education. It required that instruction be "age and developmentally appropriate" and allowed parents to have their children opt out. To call this an accomplishment seems a departure for a campaign that was insisting just last week that Mr. Obama had no legislation to his credit, conveniently ignoring his significant work on a lobbying reform bill. Mr. Obama's support for the Illinois measure seems both reasonable and relatively unimportant.

John McCain is a serious man who promised to wage a serious campaign. Win or lose, will he be able to look back on this one with pride? Right now, it's hard to see how.

More of the Same

"When I ran for office, I ran for change. Except in 2004, I felt like we ought not to change."

-- President Bush, on John McCain's anti-White House ads

The Packaged Candidate

Confronting Our True Enemies

Yesterday on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid issued the following statement regarding the misplaced foreign policy priorities of Bush-McCain Republicans:

“Over the August recess, I had the opportunity to travel to Afghanistan. During my trip, I met with some of our generals and troops who are fighting on the front lines every day. During those meetings, they reinforced for me their courage and determination to win the fight against the Taliban and the terrorists. I also learned more about the determination of the Afghan people. One part of the trip took me to a vocational school, where young Afghani men and women were receiving training in English, computers, car repair and other skills so that they could help pull their families – and their country – out of poverty and toward a brighter day.

“Despite years of chaos and bloodshed, despite many families torn apart by war, the young people I met were still brimming with hope. Seeing these young men and women study together, I was reminded of the difference the United States has made by aiding their fight against the Taliban. The courage of our troops and the Afghan people was inspiring. But there was another conclusion that I could not avoid: the progress I saw is being terribly undermined by deteriorating security. I returned to America more convinced than ever that the greatest threat to our national security lies in Afghanistan and Pakistan – and these places must be our central focus. Today, one day from the seventh anniversary of the most violent terrorist attack ever to take place on American soil, the mastermind of that attack – Osama Bin Laden – remains free.

“For all the tough rhetoric of chasing Bin Laden to the gates of hell, the Bush Administration has failed to put the necessary resources and manpower into the hunt for America’s No. 1 enemy. President Bush has rightly said that the war on terror is about more than just one man. Yet seven years after 9/11, the President has allowed that one man’s vast al Qaeda network regroup in its safe haven in Pakistan. And in Afghanistan, the sad fact is that the Taliban – the brutally oppressive regime that housed Bin Laden and al Qaeda – is on the rise, attacking our troops and innocent Afghan civilians.

“We must be clear-eyed in our realization that the very same people who attacked us then continue to regain strength and threaten us now. This dire situation could have been avoided. When President Bush took us into Afghanistan following September 11th, Democrats, our country and the world stood with him. We knew it was a fight we must wage and win. But after a series of military victories, the President lost focus and turned instead to an ill-conceived war in Iraq. With the job unfinished in Afghanistan, the President devoted our troops and treasure to another battlefield. Predictably, with focus shifted, Afghanistan began to backslide, with neighborhoods once reclaimed from the enemy becoming battlegrounds once again.

“The reason for these failures is no mystery. No matter how hard the Republican spin machine tries to rewrite history and obscure the truth, the fact is that the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 were in Afghanistan, not Iraq. Yet George Bush, John McCain and their Republican allies chose to shift our resources away from where our enemy lives and into a place that had nothing to do with al Qaeda.

“Afghanistan is a far larger country than Iraq, with a much larger population, and far rougher terrain. Yet today, we have 34,000 American forces in Afghanistan and 146,000 in Iraq. Afghanistan is much poorer than Iraq – one of the poorest countries in the world – yet we have spent $170 billion in Afghanistan, and nearly $650 billion in Iraq. Afghanistan is the home of Al Qaeda, the home of the Taliban, and the central front of the War on Terror. Yet there are more than three times as many troops in Iraq and we have spent nearly four times as much money there.

“The result of this Republican failure is clear: after a drop in violence early in the Afghanistan war, the Taliban came back with a vengeance in mid-2006. By that time, we didn’t have enough troops on the ground to respond. The troops we needed were 1,500 miles away, in Iraq. The commander of American forces in the region, Admiral William Fallon, put it this way in January: ‘Back in 2001, early 2002, the Taliban were pretty much vanquished. But my sense looking back is that we moved focus to Iraq, which was the priority from 2003 on, and the attention and the resources focused on a different place.’

“With resources focused on a different place, as Admiral Fallon said, here is what we are now seeing: In July, nearly twice as many U.S. troops were killed in Afghanistan than in Iraq; June was the second deadliest month in Afghanistan for coalition and U.S. forces since the start of the war; In Eastern Afghanistan, attacks on coalition troops increased by 40 percent over the first five months of this year; Roadside bombings have increased; and Opium production is up, with Afghanistan producing 93 percent of the world’s opium.

“And President Bush’s failures in Iraq and Afghanistan have had consequences beyond the borders of those two countries. This morning, the bipartisan American
Security Project issued a report noting that attacks by violent terrorist groups around the world are at an all time high – and this is without counting terrorist attacks in Iraq or Afghanistan. Their report also notes that ungoverned spaces continue to provide sanctuary for terrorist organizations, including Afghanistan, East and North Africa, and Somalia.

“Yesterday, President Bush had one last chance to meaningfully change his strategy and begin to reverse all these backsliding trends. He chose not to. He chose to stick with the status quo and not make significant changes. And unfortunately, we have seen no reason to believe that a John McCain presidency would offer any break from the failed Bush foreign policy.

“For all his talk about listening to the commanders on the ground, George Bush is dangerously deaf to the calls of our commanders in Afghanistan. In the words of Admiral Mullen, ‘I’ve made no secret of my desire to flow more forces, U.S. forces, to Afghanistan just as soon as I can, nor have I been shy about saying that those forces will not be available unless or until the situation in Iraq permits us to do so.’

“We know today that no more than a token shift of troop levels will take place until we have a new President committed to winning the war on terror by fighting the actual terrorists. That will require a new approach to Iraq, Afghanistan, and also Pakistan.

“We have seen in Pakistan a dangerous approach by President Bush of placing all our bets on one man – General Musharraf. That was a fatal and avoidable blunder. Musharraf did not implement democracy, did not uphold human rights and did not stop the terrorists operating inside Pakistan’s borders. American dollars meant to fight terrorism were wasted. The Pakistani people suffered, and the United States lost credibility with them for supporting a dictator who did not uphold their basic rights. Because of President Bush’s failed approach to Pakistan, we have now seen al Qaeda regroup within its borders.

“According to the declassified key judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate of July 2007 titled ‘The Terrorist Threat to the US Homeland,’ al Qaeda has ‘protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including a safe haven in the Pakistani Federal Administered Tribal Areas.’ The intelligence agencies reiterated this a few weeks ago, saying that al Qaeda ‘has maintained or strengthened key elements of its capability to attack the United States in the past year.’

“During our time in Afghanistan, from our meetings with President Karzai to our meetings with American generals, one message was clear: we cannot solve the problem in Afghanistan without solving the problem in Pakistan.

“Those concerned with the writing of our history books will have ample opportunity to delve into the Bush failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan in far greater detail than I have done in my remarks. The historians will note that on George Bush’s watch, the Taliban grew stronger, running their operations from terrorist bases inside Pakistan. They will note that under George Bush’s watch, al Qaeda regrouped, ready to carry out other attacks against the United States. And they will note that on George Bush’s watch, our national security was jeopardized and the threats that led to the attacks in 2001 are as grave if not graver in 2008.

“Our job in Congress is not to do the job of the historians, but to answer one question: Where do we go from here? President Bush gave his answer to that question yesterday. His answer was: we don’t go anywhere. We stay exactly where we are.

“John McCain has made it clear that he stands in place with George Bush. With due respect due to the President and Senator McCain, the status quo has failed. They are out of touch with the realities and ramifications of our efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“I saw in Afghanistan a people eager, desperate and ready to lift their country to democracy, equality and economic opportunity, but held down by the weight of an enemy we failed to destroy. I hope that in the coming months, our courageous, overworked, overstretched, overstressed troops can continue to hold off the enemy without the full resources and manpower necessary to complete the mission. And I hope that the American people will have the wisdom to choose a leader who will take the war on terror back to the terrorists and look the Afghan people in the eye and say that help is on the way.”

The Celebrity Candidate

Shuffling Priorities

In August, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, Barack Obama laid out several of his foreign policy priorities in a speech titled “The War We Need to Win.” In that speech, he spoke of the increasing violence in Afghanistan, the resurgence of the Taliban, and the lawless sanctuaries in Pakistan that have devolved into safe-havens for al-Qaeda and into launching points from which militants attack U.S. forces.

"Let me make this clear: There are terrorists holed up in those mountains, that murdered 3,000 Americans. If we have actionable intelligence about high-valued terrorist targets and if President Musharraf will not act, we will."

Obama was quickly ridiculed and criticized for his 'naïve recklessness'. Hillary Clinton: “I don’t think it was a particularly wise position to take” because “he basically threatened to bomb Pakistan.” John McCain, who told crowds at every campaign stop that he would follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of Hell, asked "Will we risk the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate who once suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan?"

In the end, was Barack Obama really so naïve? As reported today:

President George W. Bush secretly approved U.S. military raids inside Pakistan against alleged terrorist targets, according to a former intelligence official with recent access to the Bush administration's debate about how to fight al-Qaida and the Taliban inside the lawless tribal border area.

The Times:

President Bush secretly approved orders in July that for the first time allow American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government, according to senior American officials. The classified orders signal a watershed for the Bush administration after nearly seven years of trying to work with Pakistan to combat the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and after months of high-level stalemate about how to challenge the militants’ increasingly secure base in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

American officials say that they will notify Pakistan when they conduct limited ground attacks like the Special Operations raid last Wednesday in a Pakistani village near the Afghanistan border, but that they will not ask for its permission. “The situation in the tribal areas is not tolerable,” said a senior American official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of the missions. “We have to be more assertive. Orders have been issued.”

The new orders reflect concern about safe havens for Al Qaeda and the Taliban inside Pakistan, as well as an American view that Pakistan lacks the will and ability to combat militants. They also illustrate lingering distrust of the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies and a belief that some American operations had been compromised once Pakistanis were advised of the details.

In the words of Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

Afghanistan and Pakistan "are inextricably linked in a common insurgency that crosses the border between them. Until we work more closely with the Pakistani government to eliminate the safe havens from which they operate, the enemy will only keep coming."

To highlight the direness of the situation, he issued an even more blunt statement: “I’m not convinced we’re winning in Afghanistan. [But] I am convinced we can.” To that end, he has ordered a comprehensive military strategy to better address the growing threat from the border region. The Post elaborates:

On the day after President Bush announced he will cut troops in Iraq and bolster them in Afghanistan between now and early 2009, Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates also signaled that they would give increasing priority to the Afghan war and the expanding insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan. "The war on terror started in this region. It must end there," Gates told the committee.

Violence has mounted for more than two years in Afghanistan from an increasingly sophisticated and brazen insurgency, one fueled by havens in Pakistan. As a result, the war is exacting a worsening toll on coalition forces, with the number of U.S. troop deaths projected to surpass last year's high of 117. So far this year, 109 troops have died. U.S. and NATO troops remain hampered by manpower shortages, a lack of helicopters and a disjointed chain of command.

"Frankly, we are running out of time," Mullen said, adding that not sending U.S. reinforcements to Afghanistan is "too great a risk to ignore."

He said the new influx of U.S. forces into Afghanistan that Bush announced Tuesday -- an Army brigade and Marine battalion with a total of about 4,500 troops -- does not meet the demands of commanders there, but is "a good start." Already, total U.S. forces in Afghanistan have grown from 21,000 troops in 2006 to nearly 31,000 today.

Casualties of War

One of the ramifications of the Bush Administration’s rush to war in Iraq was that it offered returning service-members a Veterans Administration that was unready and incapable of handling both the influx of returning troops in need of care and the complexities of their injuries. Troops were engaged in a war with no front lines and, because of improved armor (when it was available) and combat medical technology, they were surviving blasts and injuries that would have killed many of their predecessors from generations past. While grateful for their lives, they were left to confront mental health issues such as Traumatic Brain Injury and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in unprecedented numbers. Along with increased and extended deployments, this trend has led to symptoms such as depression and bouts of rage which cost many of them their civilian jobs, their families, and, in increasing numbers, their lives. CNN reports:

“The rate of suicides among-active duty soldiers is on pace to surpass both last year's numbers and the rate of suicide in the general U.S. population for the first time since the Vietnam war, according to U.S. Army officials. As of August, 62 Army soldiers have committed suicide, and 31 cases of possible suicide remain under investigation, according to Army statistics. Last year, the Army recorded 115 suicides among its ranks, which was also higher than the previous year.

Army officials said that if the trend continues this year, it will pass the nation's suicide rate of 19.5 people per 100,000, a 2005 figure considered the most recent by the government. The rise can be attributed to the increased pace of combat operations, the number of deployments and financial and family troubles connected with deployments, Army officials said.

"Army leaders are fully aware that repeated deployments have led to increased distress and anxiety for both soldiers and their families," Secretary of the Army Pete Geren said. "This stress on the force is validated by recent studies of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans reporting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression."

To combat this disturbing trend, representatives from the DoD, the CDC and the NIH made the following recommendations:

• Design a study that will identify suicide risk among veterans of different conflicts, ages, genders, military branches and other factors.

• Improve the VA's screening for suicide among veterans with depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.

• Foster a better understanding of suitable medications for depression, PTSD and suicidal behavior.

Senator Daniel Akaka, Chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, made the following statement on the floor of the U.S. Senate:

For all that is being done to support our troops in battle, we must remember this truth: for many veterans, their battles do not end when they return from war. Instead, war returns home with them, and within them. They face an enemy that is hard to understand, and harder to defeat. Their wounds, and their enemy, are unseen. But the reality and the sometimes deadly consequences of these invisible wounds cannot be ignored.

I am deeply troubled by the latest information we have received from VA. The number of veterans lost to the enemy of suicide is rising. Suicide among Iraq and Afghanistan-era veterans is at an all time high. The most recently recorded year, 2006, saw 113 Iraq and Afghanistan-era veterans lost to suicide, almost as many as were lost in the years 2002 to 2005 combined. This is disturbing.

Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are not the only ones suffering from service-related mental health injuries. Indeed, the number of veterans found to have service-connected PTSD is not just rising – it is rising several times faster than service-connected disabilities overall. Nor are suicide and mental health only a matter of concern among discharged veterans. Recent news reports show that suicides among active-duty soldiers are positioned to reach an all-time high, exceeding last year’s record number.

Much is being done to protect and heal veterans with mental health issues. VA has expanded mental health outreach. The Vet Centers, run largely for vets and by vets, offer a safe haven and readjustment counseling. And for those in desperate need, VA now operates a 24-hour suicide hotline. In the one year it has been operating, they have received tens of thousands of calls, and performed over a thousand rescues of veterans about to take their own lives.

Unfortunately, these efforts are not enough. Veterans are committing suicide at a higher rate than their civilian counterparts. A recent RAND study found that nearly three out of four veterans in need of mental health care receive inadequate care or no care at all. This cannot be acceptable to a nation intent on protecting those who wear its uniform...

PTSD and other service-related invisible wounds are real injuries. They are also an enemy to veterans, to the families that support them, and to all Americans. It is not enough to bring our troops home – we must support them when the battle follows them home. It is unacceptable that veterans who come home safely later lose their lives to the enemy of suicide. We must do more to support those who have served us.

Jumping the Gun

The Shotgun Wedding

In a recent Post, Frank Rich discusses the “shotgun wedding” of John McCain and Sarah Palin, its implications on this election, and what it says about McCain.

McCain’s [Republican convention] address, though largely a repetitive slew of stump-speech lines and worn G.O.P. orthodoxy, reminded us of what we once liked about the guy: his aspirations to bipartisanship, his heroic service in Vietnam, his twinkle. He took his (often inaccurate) swipes at Obama, but, in winning contrast to Palin and Rudy Giuliani, he wasn’t smug or nasty. The only problem, of course, is that the entire thing was a sham.

As is nakedly evident, the speech’s central argument, that the 72-year-old McCain will magically morph into a powerful change agent as president, is a non sequitur. In his 26 years in Washington, most of it with a Republican in the White House and roughly half of it with Republicans in charge of Congress, he was better at lecturing his party about reform than leading a reform movement. G.O.P. corruption and governmental dysfunction only grew. So did his cynical flip-flops on the most destructive policies of the president who remained nameless Thursday night. (In the G.O.P., Bush love is now the second most popular love that dare not speak its name.)

Even more fraudulent, if that’s possible, is the contrast between McCain’s platonic presentation of his personal code of honor and the man he has become. He always puts his country first, he told us: “I’ve been called a maverick.” If there was any doubt that that McCain has fled, confirmation arrived with his last-minute embrace of Sarah Palin.

McCain and the Republican base have hedged all their bets on Palin but they have to be growing more and more uncomfortable with the reality that, as appealing as her personality may be, her rhetoric doesn't match her record. And it's not even close.

She didn’t say “no thanks” to the “Bridge to Nowhere” until after Congress had already abandoned it but given Alaska a blank check for $223 million in taxpayers’ money anyway. Far from rejecting federal pork, she hired lobbyists to secure her town a disproportionate share of earmarks ($1,000 per resident in 2002, 20 times the per capita average in other states). Though McCain claimed “she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities,” she has never issued a single command as head of the Alaska National Guard. As for her “executive experience” as mayor, she told her hometown paper in Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, the year of her election: “It’s not rocket science. It’s $6 million and 53 employees.” Her much-advertised crusade against officials abusing their office is now compromised by a bipartisan ethics investigation into charges that she did the same.

How long before we learn she never shot a moose?

Given the actuarial odds that could make Palin our 45th president, it would be helpful to know who this mystery woman actually is. Meanwhile, two eternal axioms of our politics remain in place. Americans vote for the top of the ticket, not the bottom. And in judging the top of the ticket, voters look first at the candidates’ maiden executive decision, their selection of running mates. Whatever we do and don’t know about Palin’s character at this point, there is no ambiguity in what her ascent tells us about McCain’s character and potential presidency.

He wanted to choose the pro-abortion-rights Joe Lieberman as his vice president. If he were still a true maverick, he would have done so. But instead he chose partisanship and politics over country. “God only made one John McCain, and he is his own man,” said the shafted Lieberman in his own tedious convention speech last week. What a pathetic dupe. McCain is now the man of James Dobson and Tony Perkins. The “no surrender” warrior surrendered to the agents of intolerance not just by dumping his pal for Palin but by moving so far to the right on abortion that even Cindy McCain seemed unaware of his radical shift when being interviewed by Katie Couric last week.

That ideological sellout, unfortunately, was not the worst leadership trait the last-minute vice presidential pick revealed about McCain. His speed-dating of Palin reaffirmed a more dangerous personality tic that has dogged his entire career. His decision-making process is impetuous and, in its Bush-like preference for gut instinct over facts, potentially reckless.

This is a roll of the dice beyond even Bill Clinton’s imagination. “Often my haste is a mistake,” McCain conceded in his 2002 memoir, “but I live with the consequences without complaint.” Well, maybe it’s fine if he wants to live with the consequences, but what about his country? Should the unexamined Palin prove unfit to serve at the pinnacle of American power, it will be too late for the rest of us to complain.

[The Palin choice] was brilliant politics — not because it rallied the G.O.P.’s shrinking religious-right base. America loves nothing more than a new celebrity face, and the talking heads marched in lock step last week to proclaim her a star. Palin is a high-energy distraction from the top of the ticket, even if the provenance of her stardom is in itself a reflection of exactly what’s frightening about the top of the ticket.

By hurling charges of sexism and elitism at any easily cowed journalist who raises a question about Palin, McCain operatives are hoping to ensure that whatever happened in Alaska with Sarah Palin stays in Alaska. Given how little vetting McCain himself has received this year — and that only 58 days remain until Nov. 4 — they just might pull it off.

Culture Wars, not Real Wars

In a recent column, Roger Cohen provides a thoughtful commentary on John McCain’s full-fledged “cut and run” from an actual war of ideas. Beyond its obvious cheapness and destructiveness, as Cohen insists, this kind of politics can be downright dangerous when it comes to matters of national security. Nevertheless, McCain and Palin offer just more of the same.

The culture-war surge in the U.S election campaign has come at the expense of meaningful debate about the real wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s dangerous because they stand at critical junctures. We’ve had Sarah Palin at the Republican National Convention setting a new low for foreign policy with her attempt to mock Barack Obama’s approach to international terrorists: “He’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights.” I’m sorry, Ms. Palin, but out there in Alaska, between moose shoots, did you hear about Bagram, Abu Ghraib, renditions, waterboarding, Guantánamo and the rest?

John McCain knows what happens when those rights disappear. He described his Vietnamese nightmare the next night: “They worked me over harder than they ever had before. For a long time. And they broke me.” A man remembers getting broken: that’s why McCain fought the use of torture by the Bush administration. His condoning of those words from his vice-presidential candidate is appalling. Foreign policy be damned if you can score a God-fearing-macho-versus-liberal-constitutionalist point.

But the bloody wars, seven years after 9/11, have not paused for this sterile U.S. cultural battle. With some 180,000 troops in the two theaters, U.S. reserve capacity is stretched to the limit — something Iran knows when it keeps the centrifuges turning and Russia knows when it grabs Georgia.

In the end:

Two intractable wars should preclude the culture war McCain has just so shamelessly embraced. He loves the word “fight.” So fight on the issues — and let the people decide.

Running from Reality

In a recent Times editorial, Bob Herbert discusses "the Maverick's" sprint from reality and his recent (and farcical) embrace of "change." For some reason, the whole "experience" theme for his campaign isn't quite as effective as it once was. An excerpt:

It stretches the mind almost to the breaking point to think of John McCain as an agent of substantive change. He once believed that Phil Gramm was the most qualified person in the United States to be president. And he now believes that Sarah Palin is the most qualified to be vice president. That is not the fault of Mr. Gramm or Ms. Palin. But it sure tells us a lot about the judgment of John McCain.

Mr. McCain is a warrior, a former fighter pilot, and it’s no secret that Americans have long been thrilled by the romantic Top Gun narrative of fighter pilots, those specialists in the realm of the dangerous and the reckless. But we’ve also seen what dangerous and reckless behavior in the White House can do to a nation. Sarah Palin may someday become president, and for all we know she may be a great one. But she was not chosen as Mr. McCain’s running mate after long and careful consideration and consultation. The best evidence is that she was a somewhat impulsive choice.

Voters would be well advised to proceed with caution. For most voters, the No. 1 issue in this campaign is the financial struggle facing working families that are trying to cope with job losses, declining wages, the high cost of health care, home foreclosures, bankruptcies and the like. To a great extent these problems are the result of national policies, forged under Republican rule, that overwhelmingly favored the interests of the very wealthy over working people.

Senator McCain’s economic guru through all of this was Mr. Gramm, a former Republican senator from Texas and chairman of the banking committee. He was a demon for deregulation, and he and his wife, Wendy, who once led the presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief in the Reagan administration, were among the big recipients of Enron’s largess. Phil Gramm was one of the lead architects of the breathtakingly irresponsible policies (No more restraints! No more regulation!) that led to the subprime mortgage meltdown and the current credit disaster. A corporate insider in the Bush-Cheney mold, Mr. Gramm was thought to be in line to serve as treasury secretary in a McCain administration until July when he put his foot very publicly in his mouth. To Senator McCain’s great embarrassment, Mr. Gramm dismissed the economic downturn as a “mental recession” and complained that the U.S. had become a “nation of whiners.”

That may have been a political no-no, but it was an accurate expression of the slavish devotion of the G.O.P. to the rich and powerful among us, and of the party’s contempt for the interests of working families and the poor. Senator McCain, it should be noted, fully shared Mr. Gramm’s anti-regulatory zeal. This is an odd crowd, indeed, to be offering itself as a champion for working people.

Senator McCain has been a virtuoso at schmoozing and using the press, which he once jokingly referred to as his base. Much of the press has eagerly collaborated in the idea of him as an outsider, a maverick — in some sense an American everyman. But Mr. McCain, who has been in Washington for more than a quarter of a century, was always embedded with the forces on the side of the corporate aristocracy. He didn’t just stumble into the toxic relationships that got him into trouble with the Keating Five. And there was a reason for the closeness of his bond with Phil Gramm.

The populists’ garb hangs awkwardly on the frame of John McCain. Everyman he ain’t.

"No Maverick"

Obama Economics

In the Times, David Leonhardt explores both the economic policy and ideology of Barack Obama. As he contends, “[John McCain’s economic vision] amounts to a slightly altered version of Republican orthodoxy, with tax cuts at the core. Obama, on the other hand, has more-detailed proposals but a less obvious ideology.” An excerpt:

The most tangible way that today’s economy feels unfair is the lack of real income growth for most families. Earlier this year, when I interviewed Obama during the primaries, he was careful to say that he didn’t think President Bush deserved all that much blame for the stagnant incomes of the current decade. Income growth for most families began to slow in the 1970s, and the causes of the great pay slowdown were complex. Obama didn’t name them all, but a decent list would look something like this: new technologies that have made some blue-collar work obsolete; a slowing in the nation’s educational attainment; the shriveling of labor unions; the increase in one-parent families, which are far less economically secure; and the rise of other countries that have huge low-wage work forces.

What Obama blamed the current administration for, he said, was aggravating these trends with the tax code. To a large extent, Obama’s own economic agenda revolves around reversing Bush’s tax policies and then going a bit further in the other direction. Here, more than in his regulatory approach, Obama stands on the left side of the Democratic Party, but not exactly in the traditional tax-and-spend ways.

It’s helpful to start with a little history. When Reagan was elected, in 1980, tax rates on top incomes were so high that even liberal economists now say the economy was suffering. There simply wasn’t enough of an incentive for rich people to start new companies or expand existing ones, because so much of their profits would have gone to the federal government. Someone making the equivalent of $5 million in 1980 — in inflation-adjusted terms — would have paid a combined federal tax rate of almost 60 percent, according to research by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, two academic economists. (These calculations cover not only income taxes but also payroll taxes, capital-gains taxes and others.) Reagan, by the end of his second term, had cut this rate to about 35 percent. Clinton raised it above 40 percent, but the current President Bush has reduced it to 34 percent. So over the same period that the rich have been getting much richer before taxes, their tax rates have also been falling far faster than the rates of any other income group.

Dating back to Reagan, Republicans have packaged tax cuts on high earners with more modest middle-class tax cuts and then maneuvered the Democrats into an unwinnable choice: are you for tax cuts or against them? Obama, however, argues that this is the moment when the politics of taxes can be changed.

To do this, he is proposing tax cuts for most families that are significantly larger than those McCain is offering, along with major tax increases for families making more than $250,000 a year. “That’s essentially a major part of our economic plan,” Obama said. “But it’s also a political message.” Economically, he is trying to use the tax code to spread the bounty from the market-based American economy to a far wider group of families. Politically, he is trying to drive a wedge through the great Reagan tax gambit. The Tax Policy Center, a research group run by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, has done the most detailed analysis of the Obama and McCain tax plans, and it has published a series of fascinating tables. For the bottom 80 percent of the population — those households making $118,000 or less — McCain’s various tax cuts would mean a net savings of about $200 a year on average. Obama’s proposals would bring $900 a year in savings. So for most people, Obama is the tax cutter in this campaign.

If there is a theme to the Obama tax philosophy, it’s that the tax code is not quite as progressive as you think it is. Most of the public discussion about taxes tends to focus on the income tax, which taxes the affluent at a considerably higher rate than anyone else. But the income tax doesn’t take the biggest bite out of most families’ annual tax bill. The payroll tax does. And even as the federal government has been reducing income taxes over the last few decades, it has allowed the payroll tax, which finances Social Security and Medicare, to creep up. That’s a big reason that overall tax rates for the bottom 80 percent of earners have not fallen as much as rates for the affluent.

Obama’s second-most-expensive proposal, after his health-care plan, is the equivalent of a $500 cut in the payroll tax for most workers. (It is actually a credit that is applied toward income taxes based on payroll taxes paid.) In a speech this month in Florida, he proposed that the cut take effect immediately, in the form of a rebate, to stimulate the economy. For most workers, it would be the first significant cut in the payroll tax in decades, if not ever.

The other way that he would cut taxes involves a series of technicalities. But since the campaign began, Goolsbee has been arguing that those technicalities offer one of the best glimpses of how Obama thinks about the tax code. Right now, several big tax breaks that sound broad-based — like those for child care and mortgage interest — don’t always benefit middle-income and lower-income families. Another example is the Hope Credit for college tuition, a creation of the Clinton administration. Obama wants to more than double the credit, to $4,000. More to the point, he would make it “fully refundable.” As a result, a family with an income-tax bill of $3,000 wouldn’t merely have that bill eliminated; it would also receive a $1,000 check. Increasingly, the income-tax system becomes a way to transfer money to poor families.

All told, Obama would not only cut taxes for most people more than McCain would. He would cut them more than Bill Clinton did and more than Hillary Clinton proposed doing. These tax cuts are really the essence of his market-oriented redistributionist philosophy (though he made it clear that he doesn’t like the word “redistributionist”). They are an attempt to address the middle-class squeeze by giving people a chunk of money to spend as they see fit.

He would then pay for the cuts, at least in part, by raising taxes on the affluent to a point where they would eventually be slightly higher than they were under Clinton. For these upper-income families, the Tax Policy Center’s comparisons with McCain are even starker. McCain, by continuing the basic thrust of Bush’s tax policies and adding a few new wrinkles, would cut taxes for the top 0.1 percent of earners — those making an average of $9.1 million — by another $190,000 a year, on top of the Bush reductions. Obama would raise taxes on this top 0.1 percent by an average of $800,000 a year.

It’s hard not to look at that figure and be a little stunned. It would represent a huge tax increase on the wealthy families. But it’s also worth putting the number in some context. The bulk of Obama’s tax increases on the wealthy — about $500,000 of that $800,000 — would simply take away Bush’s tax cuts. The remaining $300,000 wouldn’t nearly reverse their pretax income gains in recent years. Since the mid-1990s, their inflation-adjusted pretax income has roughly doubled.

To put it another way, the wealthy have done so well over the past few decades, with their incomes soaring and tax rates plummeting, that Obama’s plan would not come close to erasing their gains. The same would be true of households making a few hundred thousand dollars a year (who have gotten smaller raises than the very rich but would also face smaller tax increases). As ambitious as Obama’s proposals might be, they would still leave the gap between the rich and everyone else far wider than it is now.

The Tax Policy Center's "Preliminary Analysis of the 2008 Presidential Candidates' Tax Plans" provides more analysis.

The two candidates' plans would have sharply different distributional effects. Senator McCain's tax cuts would primarily benefit those with very high incomes, almost all of whom would receive large tax cuts that would, on average, raise their after-tax incomes by more than twice the average for all households. Many fewer households at the bottom of the income distribution would get tax cuts and those whose taxes fall would, on average, see their after-tax income rise much less. In marked contrast, Senator Obama offers much larger tax breaks to low- and middle-income taxpayers and would increase taxes on high-income taxpayers. The largest tax cuts, as a share of income, would go to those at the bottom of the income distribution, while taxpayers with the highest income would see their taxes rise.

The impact of the tax code on economic activity under each candidate's policies would differ in several important ways. Under Senator McCain's proposed policies, the top marginal rates (35 percent on individual income and 25 percent on corporate income) would be significantly lower than under Senator Obama's plan (39.6 and 35 percent, respectively). McCain's reduced individual and corporate rates could improve economic efficiency and increase domestic investment, but the larger future deficits would reduce and could completely offset any positive effect. In contrast, Senator Obama's proposed new tax credits could encourage desirable behavior, particularly if the childless EITC and payroll tax rebate encourage additional labor supply among childless low-income individuals. However, he would also direct new subsidies at an already favored group-seniors -and an already favored activity-borrowing for housing-which could probably be better directed elsewhere.

The McCain-Palin Anthem

The Republican base has been quick to embrace their new celebrity candidate, Sarah Palin. They love the confident and combatative hockey-mom whose feistiness on the basketball court earned her the high school nickname of “Sarah Barracuda.” As conservatives are quick (and right) to point out, it’s still an apt nickname.

So along with infusing new energy into the McCain campaign, their pit-bull with lipstick had apparently done something equally as important -- she had provided an opportunity for the campaign to embrace a new anthem. On the way to the White House, they would henceforth march to the sweet sounds of Heart’s "Barracuda." It was perfect -- a classic power ballad performed by rock’s beloved Wilson sisters, who just happen to be from the Pacific Northwest. The delegates at the Republican convention LOVED it. Dance moves not seen since the early 80s were dusted off in a spontaneous celebration of everything the party of George W. Bush holds dear. It was a sight to behold.



But just as things appeared too good to be true, they were. Out of nowhere, a cold splash of water was thrown in their faces...by the Wilson sisters.

"Sarah Palin's views and values in NO WAY represent us as American women. We ask that our song 'Barracuda' no longer be used to promote her image. The song 'Barracuda' was written in the late 70s as a scathing rant against the soulless, corporate nature of the music business, particularly for women. (The 'barracuda' represented the business.)”

And then the dagger…

“While Heart did not and would not authorize the use of their song at the RNC, there's irony in Republican strategists' choice to make use of it there."

The Undermining of Family Values

On Slate, Jacob Weisberg explores how pro-life absolutism undermines family values.

In the 1980s, the rising conservative movement tried to frame the pro-life cause as part of a broader family-values agenda that included reducing rates of illegitimate childbirth, welfare dependency, and divorce. To Ronald Reagan and many of his most ardent supporters, abortion-on-demand was the pre-eminent example of the breakdown of traditional morality brought about the sexual revolution. Few remember it this way, but Reagan's "evil empire" speech, delivered to the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983, had more to say about the right of parents to prevent their daughters from receiving contraceptives without their consent than it did than about the Soviets.

In fact, these two conservative social goals—ending abortion and upholding the model of the nuclear family—were always in tension. The reason is that, like it or not, the availability of legal abortion supports the kind of family structure that conservatives once felt so strongly about: two parents raising children in a stable relationship, without government assistance. By 12th grade, 60 percent of high school girls are sexually active or, as Reagan put it, "promiscuous." Teen-pregnancy rates have been trending downward in recent years, but even so, 7 percent of high-school girls become pregnant every year. And the unfortunate reality is that teenagers who carry their pregnancies to term drastically diminish their chances of living out the conservative, or the American, dream.

Forget the Juno scenario—in the real world, only a tiny fraction of unwed mothers give their babies up for adoption. If you do not allow teenage girls who accidentally become pregnant to have abortions, you are demanding either that they raise their children as single mothers or that they marry in shotgun weddings. By the numbers, neither choice is promising. Unmarried teenage moms seldom get much financial or emotional support from the fathers of their babies. They tend to drop out of high school and go on the dole, and they are prone to lives of poverty, frustration, and disorder. Only 2 percent of them make it through college by the age of 30. The Bristol Palin option doesn't promote family happiness, stability, or traditional structure, either. Of women under 18 who marry, whether because of pregnancy or not, nearly half divorce within 10 years—double the rate for those who wait until they're 25.

I've long expected the Republican Party to resolve this conflict in its social vision by moderating its stance on abortion. Politically, pro-life absolutism has never made much sense. A significant element within the GOP—libertarians, economic conservatives, Barbara Bush—favors leaving Roe v. Wade alone. A majority of the country agrees. Meanwhile, the percentage of people on either side of the debate who say they'll vote only for a candidate who shares their views has been steadily shrinking. Since Lee Atwater's heyday, pragmatic Republicans have been trying to figure out how the party can become a "big tent," making room for a pro-choice as well as a pro-life faction. Until recently, the modernizers included John McCain himself, who in 1999 said, "Certainly in the short term, or even the long term, I would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would then force women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations."

That was only one of several attempts on McCain's part to evolve his position. If Roe ever were repealed, there would follow a fight in every state about whether to ban abortion by statute. Politically, this could be the best thing to happen to liberals since the New Deal. We got a taste of this dynamic after the Supreme Court's 1989 Webster decision, which allowed states to restrict abortion in certain ways. As my colleague William Saletan has argued, fear of Roe being overturned contributed to Democratic electoral gains in 1989 and 1990 and to a wave of more conciliatory rhetoric from the GOP.

But renewed evangelical dominance of the GOP in the Bush years has pushed McCain in the opposite direction—to the point of letting Phyllis Schlafly revise the abortion plank in the party's 2008 platform. The new version actually eliminates language from the 2004 edition rejecting "punitive action against women who have an abortion." This "base" bias explains how McCain ended up with a wildly underqualified running mate, instead of his preferred pro-choice veep picks, Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge. It's the reason social conservatives have wholeheartedly embraced Sarah Palin, who chose to raise a child with Down syndrome rather than terminate a pregnancy. And it's why a pregnant, unmarried 17-year-old and her boyfriend appeared onstage in St. Paul with the Republican presidential nominee last week. A pregnant teenager as role model, Mary Cheney's gay parenting, the primary caregiver to a special-needs infant working a second, 24/7 job—the Republican right is prepared to overcome its objection to all of this and more as the price of an uncompromising pro-life agenda.

Give the anti-abortion extremists credit for living their principles. If they weren't deadly serious, they wouldn't sabotage their party's political prospects or sacrifice so many other values they hold dear for the sake of denying exceptions in cases of rape and incest. But Sarah Palin's pro-life extremism is as ethically flawed as it is politically damaging to the GOP. By vaunting their pro-life agenda over everything else, conservatives are abandoning one of their most valuable insights: that intact, two-parent families are best for children and for the foundation of a healthy society.

The evidence here is overwhelming. Children with two parents, whether of the same sex or the opposite sex, are vastly better off. By every measure social scientists have devised, those raised by two parents grow up healthier (physically and psychologically), wealthier, and wiser, on average, than those raised by a single parent, divorced parents, or even a parent and a stepparent.

About this, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Bill Bennett, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and, yes, Dan Quayle were entirely correct. Remember Murphy Brown? I always thought the former vice president was on solid ground when he called it morally irresponsible to encourage women without the TV character's resources to embark on child-rearing on their own. In today's GOP, Quayle wouldn't condemn Murphy Brown. He'd call her up to the stage and salute her for choosing life.