Plumbing the week

This was the week of the last debate, when John McCain asserted that “the very fabric of democracy” was put in danger by ACORN’s less than perfect efforts to register new voters and hoisted “Joe the Plumber” to national fame.

On Monday, Barack Obama started the week with a 10 point advantage in the polls. “Right where we want him“, said John McCain. Oh, really?

On Tuesday, John McCain retooled his economic message, and introduced the country to Joe the Plumber and attacked Barack Obama for talking of “spreading the wealth”. The republican candidate also gave new emphasis to his guilt-by-associations attacks on Barack Obama, and insisted that a massive electoral fraud was about to be perpetrated by ACORN.

On Wednesday, John McCain had his best debate performance ever, but that was still not enough to close the gap. Reluctant to give the victory to Barack Obama as the polls had, he declared: “Joe the Plumber is the winner”.

The next day, of course, we learned that Joe the Plumber was neither a Joe nor a plumber, and that he was a republican voter. We also learned that his last name was misspelled on his electoral registration – which added a dose of irony to the Ohio republican party’s legal proceedings regarding the 200 000 names of local voters that did not seem to match the public database.

On Friday, the Supreme Court sided with the Ohio secretary of State in charge of elections, a democrat. The federal appeals court was not competent in the matter; its order was void. However, that same day, the information was leaked that the FBI had followed up on the request by several republican member of Congress to open an investigation on ACORN.

On Saturday, a lawyer for the Obama campaign also wrote Attorney General Mukasey – this time to ask that these maneuvers by the RNC be examined, and added to the task of the independent prosecutor currently looking into possible indictments after the firing of US prosecutors by the Bush administration.

On Sunday, Colin Powell made the most complete case for his choice to vote for Barack Obama… and a total indictment of John McCain: “unsure” on the economical crisis, with questionable judgment as he selected Sarah Palin “incompetent to be President” as his running mate. The centrist republican hits every note that might resonate with independent undecided voters: his anxiety regarding appointments to the Supreme Court, the tone and the divisiveness of the republican campaign. He denounced in particular the vitriolic “robocalls” that the McCain/Palin campaign had launched in swing States.

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READ THIS WEEK (a little extra from the French viewpoints):

President Sarkozy’s visit to Camp David (with the president of the European commission) gets more play in the French press, obviously, than it does in the US. The financial summit to be organized in November, after the American presidential election, will be the ultimate lame-duck experience for President Bush, a fact not entirely lost on the vocal Europeans.

The internal investigation of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s conduct at the IMF (revealed by the always zealous Wall Street Journal, when it comes to such matters) also gets a different play – if only because the notion of private and public life are markedly different in each country… or should I write “were different”, considering the increased “pipolisation” – as in “people-ization” of French politics by Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy? In this case, DSK’s wife is famous in her own right. She’s a well-known journalist; she writes a blog on which she thanked those who sent her sympathetic messages and assured them that, as far as she and her husband is concerned, this brief incident is already in the past. She hopes for swift conclusions from the investigation, a desire that can only be shared by the many that think that, in the midst of the most consequential economical crisis in recent history, the IMF has more pressing issues to consider.

Joe the plumber, vetted just as well as Sarah Palin was?

So “Joe the Plumber” is not a Joe after all… He’s at best a “Sam”, as in “Samuel J. Wulzerbacher”. And he’s not really a plumber either. And he is in no imminent danger of being hit by the tax increase Barack Obama proposes for those who earn more than $250 000 a year. Well, at least we know he’s a republican, thanks to his vote in the republican primary last March – we won’t nitpick on the fact that, while the Ohio republican party is frantic about the risks of registration fraud, he’s actually registered to vote as “Wolzerbacher”.

It just begs the question: who, in the McCain team, suggested turning “Joe the Plumber” into the star of the presidential debate (actually, its “winner”, according to John McCain) and did not do a basic check before casting the bold bald-headed unknown under the national spotlight? Ah, must be that same person who thought it would be fine to check Sarah Palin’s possible liabilities after she would have been announced as McCain’s running mate.

Just like that: the words about the debate

TheTwitterPicture

“Just” a pretty picture of the words most used by people commenting the Nashville debate on Twitter. It’s “like” we twitter “just like” we chat.

An answer to that “what don’t you know?” question

Remember that question with “a certain zen-like quality” that Tom Brokaw choose to close the presidential debate: “What don’t you know, and how will you learn it?”

Here’s my contribution, by way of an excellent piece, good to the last gulp, by Steve Coll: – here.

There is much we don’t know, it appears, about the “shadow banking system” and the size of “a global private market whose products, combined, have a nominal value roughly equal to the size of the world economy’s output in a year”.

At the rate things are going, it’s going to be some Halloween…

Barack Obama’s steady performance

John McCain’s sense of humor serves him well in a real “town hall”. In the contrived version of this second debate, it fell flat. Worse: it provided countless awkward moments – without even mentioning the instant cliché of the night, his finger pointed at “that one”. So Barack Obama, by virtue of appearing both “presidential” and “connecting” with the audience, won the night: no event means smooth sailing for the favorite. John McCain repeats that “we need a steady hand on the till”; the first polls indicate that most people trust Barack Obama can be that firm hand and that, better yet, he can guide them in a better direction.

Let me count the ways McCain tripped himself… Asked who would be his Treasury secretary, he quips “Not you, Tom”. The man who owns 13 cars chooses to deride “gold plated Cadillac”-style health plans, and if that were not bad enough, throws in a reference to “hair transplants”. He looks old tonight, and he compares Obama to Herbert Hoover. He warns that “on the job training” is not an option – did he forget he’s running with Sarah Palin?

It would not matter as much if we had heard anything new tonight. The fresh substance was scarce:  Barack Obama proclaimed health care a “right”; John McCain came up with a  new proposal on mortgages – his own, he insists, “not Obama’s not Bush’s” (add that to the strange moments list). Neither man had time to flesh out his ideas, so we’ll probably find out soon if the short version “tested” well enough that we will be treated to a little more of the details. Beyond that, we heard the usual fare of tax plans, energy plans, positions on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia… and are we supposed to be surprised that neither candidate would “wait for the United Nations”, should Iran attack Israel?

After three debates, two presidential and a vice-presidential, the overriding impression is that both campaigns crafted the format of the discussions to ensure that they would be as un-newsworthy as possible. It is a disservice to the candidates, as well as to the American public. I wish journalists would refuse to play along, and recused themselves from being the “hired help” as Tom Brokaw was chagrined to have to describe his own role tonight. Their minimum demand, if they are going to put their credibility on the line, should be a right to “follow up”.

The bailout week

This was bailout week, with only a bit of light entertainment: the vice-presidential debate, Thursday night.

On Monday, the bailout was re-branded the “buy-in”. It had inflated from 3 to 110 pages. Nobody seemed to like the plan, yet the leadership of the House (as well as both presidential candidates and the Bush administration) thought it would pass. John McCain was so hopeful that he took credit for it Monday morning.

Then it all crashed. The plan was voted down. The blame game started quickly, with republicans pointing to the House Speaker’s partisan speech. Barney Frank, chairman of the Finance Committee, fired back: republicans were refusing to rescue the nation’s economy “because their feelings were hurt?” At the end of the day, the markets had sunk with historical velocity. 12 missing votes translated to 777 points vanishing from the Dow. Barack Obama pleaded for calm; John McCain blamed the day’s fiasco on Barack Obama… for blaming him.

Tuesday, George Bush appealed to the nation: the situation is grave. Talks would be on-going between his administration and Congress.

Wednesday, both presidential candidates toned down their rhetoric. It also became quickly apparent that Barack Obama was benefiting from the crisis. The economy has become the paramount worry amongst Americans, and, on that issue, they trust him more than they do John McCain. The first elements of a new version of the plan started to emerge. A vote was scheduled Thursday evening. Both candidates told their supporters why they would support this bitter pill of a bill, and talked about restoring the national economy – acting “for you”, in McCain’s case; “with you”, in Obama’s case. Briefly back in Washington, both senators (and Obama’s running mate, Joe Biden) approved the plan that passed the Senate 75 votes to 24. By now, it was a 450 page document, loaded with an extra 150 billions dose of sweeteners.

Thursday, as the House came back to work, the attention shifted to the vice-presidential debate. The usual expectations game was played; some conservative attacked the referee, the debate’s host Gwenn Ifill. They just discovered she was writing a book about the new African-American leaders “in the age of Obama”. The debate turned into an exercise in parallel reality in which a somewhat restrained Joe Biden answered the moderator’s questions while a petulant Sarah Palin decided to cheerfully ignore them. In the end, the public liked Sarah Palin’s TV-friendly performance but trusted Joe Biden much more to be “a heartbeat away from the presidency”.

Friday, the House passed the economic rescue plan, and George Bush signed it immediately. The markets were not as exuberant as one might have thought. Another number casts a dark pall on the national economy: 159 000 jobs lost in September, bringing the total after 9 months of consistently bad news to 750 000 jobs lost since the beginning of the year. The approval trend for John McCain kept edging lower as Americans worried about their future.

By the weekend, with polls indicating a steady improvement for Barack Obama, the McCain team had already given up in the battleground state of Michigan. That retreat was not to be confused with a lack of fighting spirit; the republican candidate had declared he would “take off the gloves” (not that anyone noticed that he was being particularly delicate). Sarah Palin made good on his promise. She accused Barack Obama of “palling with terrorists”, a clear distortion of the examination of the future senator’s real but tenuous relation with William Ayers, a Weatherman in the sixties, now a University of Illinois professor.

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READ THIS WEEK: (a little extra from the French viewpoints)

1. Obama’s planned negociations with Russia? Vincent Jauvert, on his blog, speculates on the possibility of the US and Russia concluding an arms reduction and arms control agreement in 2009. He quotes a Russian affairs adviser to the Obama campaign, on his way to Moscow.

2. What’s the impact of the financial crisis on Hollywood? Françoise Benhamou weighs the dangers of the current financial crisis for the American movie industry (finding financing on their domestic market was already challenging; it will be worse) and the potential effect of the $ 470 million dollars sweetener inserted in the final version of the Paulson plan (it will support “small” productions and help preserve local employment).

Betcha Biden won; Palin awarded Ms. Congeniality

Truth in advertising: Sarah Palin announced immediately that she might not answer tonight’s debate questions “the way you want”.

She might as well have said that she was not going to answer most questions; she was just going to talk. And talk she did – fast and furious, and so charmingly colloquial.

Yet a few interesting things surfaced in that blizzard. She thinks a problem can be solved while ignoring its causes (that was about global warming). She thinks “changing her mind” on something is to be politically expedient (those budgets she did not like but signed “to move things forward”). She now likes the vice-presidency so much that she wants to take the office where no vice-president, not even Dick Cheney, as taken it before, with an expanded role in the Senate (betcha senators Biden and Obama would love that). We’ll never know if she does not know what an Achilles heel is, or if she chose to ignore the question because the woman who never blinks could not possibly have an Achilles heel, or admit to it.

By the very low standard that she had set for herself after the Kouric interview, she did well. She kept on talking and applied the first law of show business: if you fumble, just keep playing. You might get lucky and no one will notice. Who reads those pesky fact-checkers, anyway? She’s so happy with herself, she even thanked Gwen Ifill gracefully for not standing in the way: she’d love to do more of these events “without the filter of the mainstream media”.

When it was over, she was deemed “refreshing” by some commentators. Sexist? Betcha the McCain campaign is not going to protest that comment, though.

Yet, the first polls seem to indicate Joe Biden won the night.

In spite of time constraints (or “thanks to”?) he appeared knowledgeable. While she seemed relieved when her time was up, one got the distinctive feeling he could have kept on talking, putting his answers in context, comparing different perspectives, etc etc., etc… Precisely what made some democrats nervous. But Joe Biden is an old pro, and when it came to tying his friend “John” to the disastrous record of the past eight years, he was peerless. He knows John, John was a friend of his – and Sarah Palin does not know John’s record half as well as Joe Biden does. She was slightly better when she managed to deliver her attack lines against Barack Obama, but barely so. They sounded like recently acquired expertise. After all, as she said herself, she’s “only been at this for five weeks”. Hopefully, a little more than five weeks from now, she won’t have to “be at this” any longer.

Instant polls seem to reflect the fact that Americans think she’s quite likable, and he’s a politician, but guess what? People, especially undecided voters, seem to prefer a politician who knows what he’s talking about “a heartbeat away from the presidency”. Tonight John McCain’s running mate won Ms. Congeniality.

Complete post on Americana: here.

Waiting for Joe and Sarah

Waiting for the vice-presidential debate, it’s a little dizzying to try and follow the preemptive spin on both side. She looks lost in her rare interviews but she’s been a great debater in the past; he’s a gaffe-machine but he’s perfectly at ease debating strong women. Come to think of it, they were knowledgeable as well – how will he do against an opponent that is not as fluent in her grasp of policies, yet “reaganesque”, we’re told, in her populist put-downs?

Just in case, there is the usual first salvo against the media: the host of the debate is writing a book that makes the McCain crowd nervous; a McCain/Palin spokesperson complains that women journalists are especially harsh against her candidate… Could it be that those pro are just doing their jobs, and are tired to have to interview competent and hopelessly disciplined smart republican women, forced to clean up one Palin messy answer after another?

Some French readers did wonder why on Earth they should care about the bottom of the ticket. Simple answer: because the choice reveals quite a bit about the presidential candidates and, this year, the “heartbeat away” question can’t be overlooked. McCain may have gambled more than he thought on his choice, with this debate taking place right when he is sliding significantly in the polls.