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.