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The state of the deal

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Here’s what the McCain campaign has to say about the current state of affairs:

To address our current financial crisis, John McCain suspended his campaign and returned to Washington, D.C., today to help build a bipartisan consensus for a proposal that would protect the American taxpayer.Despite today’s news reports, there never existed a “deal,” but merely a proposal offered by a small, select group of Members of Congress. As of right now, there exists only a series of principles, including greater oversight and measures to address CEO pay. However, these principles do not enjoy a consensus in Congress. At today’s cabinet meeting, John McCain did not attack any proposal or endorse any plan. John McCain simply urged that for any proposal to enjoy the confidence of the American people, stressing that all sides would have to cooperate and build a bipartisan consensus for a solution that protects taxpayers. However, the Democrats allowed Senator Obama to run their side of the meeting. That did not work as the meeting quickly devolved into a contentious shouting match that did not seek to craft a bipartisan solution. At this moment, the plan that has been put forth by the Administration does not enjoy the confidence of the American people as it will not protect that taxpayers and will sacrifice Main Street in favor of Wall Street. The bottom line is that as of tonight, there are not enough Republican or Democrat votes for the current plan. However, we are still optimistic that a bipartisan solution will be found. Republicans and Democrats want a deal that will protect the taxpayers. Tomorrow, John McCain will return to Capitol Hill where he will work with all sides to build a bipartisan solution that protects taxpayers and keeps Americans in their homes.

That’s certainly where the priorities ought to be: to protect responsible taxpayers and let the burden of the crisis fall on those who have been irresponsible (which means, among other things, shooting down Richard Durbin’s efforts to get the irresponsible off the hook at everyone else’s expense); unfortunately, the lobbying dollars are not with the taxpayer, they’re with the same folks whose irresponsibility and bad policies got us into this to begin with, so at the moment, I’m not real optimistic. Still, I think Megan McArdle’s right, we need to make the best deal we can make, even if we don’t think it’s a good one; if we don’t, here’s what we’re looking at (according to John Podhoretz, anyway):

If a deal isn’t reached by Sunday night, and a bill isn’t signed into law by Sunday night, it is likely we will wake up Monday morning to a market meltdown overseas of a sort the world has never seen—and then we will just wait, mute, until the American markets open. Monday will be an interesting test case: We will see just how much poorer the investing class can get in just one day. And then, a second day. And then, a week. As the whirlwind begins its reaping.

And by “the investing class” he doesn’t just mean the rich; he means all of us who need to save for the future, and have been doing so, and who could watch those savings blow away in the wind from Wall Street. Ladies and gentlemen of the Congress, you have 72 hours; if you get this wrong, they could be, to all intents and purposes, the last 72 hours of your political careers. Use them wisely.

Focus groups are for sissies

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So says Andrew Stanton (writer/director of Finding Nemo and WALL-E), anyway—and if you’re any kind of Pixar fan, you know Stanton’s one of the best things the American movie industry has going for it. During the course of a wide-ranging (and fascinating) interview with Dominic von Riedemann, he made this comment:

I don’t mean this in a negative way, but I don’t think of the audience at all, because I don’t go to see a movie hoping the filmmaker’s second-guessed what I want. I go to see what he wants, because I like his taste and style, and I want to see what he’s going to do next.The day we start thinking about what the audience wants, we’re going to make bad choices. We’ve always holed ourselves up in a building for 4 years and ignored the rest of the world, because nobody are bigger movie geeks than we are, so we know exactly what we are dying to see with our family and kids. We don’t need other people to tell us that. We trust the audience member in ourselves.

From a different corner of the entertainment industry, Ragnar Tørnquist (the driving creative force behind the adventure games The Longest Journey and Dreamfall) agrees:

You can worry yourself green about what players will and won’t like, you can do focus testing on concepts and characters, you can survey the market and conduct polls, you can identify and follow every new trend, but in the end the only opinion you can truly trust is your own and the opinions of those around you—the people who will spend three, four, five years of their lives working on a project. We’re all gamers, we all want to make—and play—the best game possible, and that’s what directs our decisions every single day.

I’m hard pressed to think of an instance in which anyone—writer, composer, preacher, politician, whatever—achieved greatness by giving people what they already know they want. You might get rich and famous that way, you might achieve some definition of success that way, but you aren’t going to make the world a better place that way.

How to fix the financial crisis

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Approve the Paulson plan with one, and only one, modification: instead of giving the Treasury Secretary the power to spend $700 billion, hire Warren Buffett to do it.

“I bet they’ll make a profit,” said Buffett, who pointed out that hedge funds specialising in junk assets were already picking up mortgage-related securities with a view to making profits of 15% to 20%. He said a positive return was feasible if the government ignores the book value of instruments or the original cost to banks and instead pays the prevailing market rates for the bombed out assets.”They’ll pay back the $700bn and make a considerable amount of money if they approach it like that,” said Buffett. “I would love to have $700bn at Treasury rates to buy fixed-income securities—there’s a lot of money to be made.”

Is John McCain recovering his footing?

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The statement he offered today suggests so:

I am calling on the President to convene a meeting with the leadership from both houses of Congress, including Senator Obama and myself. It is time for both parties to come together to solve this problem. We must meet as Americans, not as Democrats or Republicans, and we must meet until this crisis is resolved. I am directing my campaign to work with the Obama campaign and the commission on presidential debates to delay Friday night’s debate until we have taken action to address this crisis. I am confident that before the markets open on Monday we can achieve consensus on legislation that will stabilize our financial markets, protect taxpayers and homeowners, and earn the confidence of the American people. All we must do to achieve this is temporarily set politics aside, and I am committed to doing so.

As Jennifer Rubin notes, this poses an interesting conundrum for the Obama campaign:

Will Obama follow suit and disrupt his debate prep? It will be hard to say no, yet odd to follow meekly behind McCain’s invitation.

More importantly, this offers perhaps the best hope we have for a solution that will actually get us through the current crisis—especially if Sen. Obama follows suit, but maybe even if he doesn’t.Update: Duane Patterson sums this up nicely.

This sounds very familiar

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This from a 1979 Atlantic article by James Fallows, who had been one of Jimmy Carter’s speechwriters:

Sixteen months into his Administration, there was a mystery to be explained about Jimmy Carter: the contrast between the promise and popularity of his first months in office and the disappointment so widely felt later on. Part of this had to do with the inevitable end of the presidential honeymoon, with the unenviable circumstances Carter inherited, with the fickleness of the press. But much more of it grew directly from the quality Carter displayed that morning in Illinois. He was speaking with gusto because he was speaking about the subject that most inspired him: not what he proposed to do, but who he was. Where Lyndon Johnson boasted of schools built and children fed, where Edward Kennedy holds out the promise of the energies he might mobilize and the ideas he might enact, Jimmy Carter tells us that he is a good man. His positions are correct, his values sound. Like Marshal Petain after the fall of France, he has offered his person to the nation. This is not an inconsiderable gift; his performance in office shows us why it’s not enough.After two and a half years in Carter’s service, I fully believe him to be a good man. With his moral virtues and his intellectual skills, he is perhaps as admirable a human being as has ever held the job. He is probably smarter, in the College Board sense, than any other President in this century. He grasps issues quickly. He made me feel confident that, except in economics, he would resolve technical questions lucidly, without distortions imposed by cant or imperfect comprehension.He is a stable, personally confident man, whose quirks are few. . . .But if he has the gift of virtue, there are other gifts he lacks. . . .The second is the ability to explain his goals and thereby to offer an object for loyalty larger than himself. . . .The third, and most important, is the passion to convert himself from a good man into an effective one, to learn how to do the job. Carter often seemed more concerned with taking the correct position than with learning how to turn that position into results. He seethed with frustration when plans were rejected, but felt no compulsion to do better next time. He did not devour history for its lessons, surround himself with people who could do what he could not, or learn from others that fire was painful before he plunged his hand into the flame.I worked for him enthusiastically and was proud to join his Administration, for I felt that he, alone among candidates, might look past the tired formulas of left and right and offer something new. . . .But there were two factors that made many of us ignore these paper limitations. One was Carter’s remarkable charm in face-to-face encounters. All politicians must be charming to some degree, but Carter’s performance on first intimate meeting was something special. . . . I met very few people who, having sat and talked with Carter by themselves or in groups of two or three, did not come away feeling they had dealt with a formidable man. . . .Those who are close enough to Carter to speak to him frankly—Powell, Jordan, Rafshoon, perhaps Moore—either believe so totally in the rightness of his style, or are so convinced that it will never change, that they never bother to suggest that he spend his time differently, deal with people differently, think of his job in a different way. Even that handful speaks to him in tones more sincerely deferential than those the underlings use. No one outside this handful ever has an opportunity to shoot the breeze with Carter, to talk with no specific purpose and no firm limit on time.If he persists in walling himself off from challenge and disorder, Jimmy Carter will ensure that great potential is all he’ll ever have. Teaching himself by trial and error, refusing to look ahead, Carter stumbles toward achievements that might match his abilities and asks us to respect him because his intentions be been good. I grant him that respect, but know the root of my disappointment. I thought we were getting a finished work, not a handsome block of marble that the chisel never touched.

Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter aren’t the same person, of course; but there really are some strong, and worrisome, similarities between the two of them. Like President Carter, Sen. Obama offers his person to the nation. This is not an inconsiderable gift; but for him, too, his performance in office so far shows us why it’s not enough.HT: Beldar

The Ayers/Obama campaign to radicalize education

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Maybe this is why the Obama campaign tried to stop Stanley Kurtz from delving into the records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge—they didn’t want him telling people what the CAC was all about:

The CAC’s agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland’s ghetto.In works like “City Kids, City Teachers” and “Teaching the Personal and the Political,” Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? “I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist,” Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s, “Sixties Radicals,” at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.CAC translated Mr. Ayers’s radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with “external partners,” which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn). . . .The Daley documents show that Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC’s first year. He also served on the board’s governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the Collaborative. . . .Mr. Ayers’s defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin.Mr. Ayers is the founder of the “small schools” movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to “confront issues of inequity, war, and violence.” He believes teacher education programs should serve as “sites of resistance” to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his “Teaching Toward Freedom,” is to “teach against oppression,” against America’s history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming “guilt by association.” Yet the issue here isn’t guilt by association; it’s guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.

The fact that Ayers did plant bombs, and remains unrepentant about doing so, only makes it more of a story; this is why, before a national audience, Sen. Obama and his media subsidiary have done their best to keep it out of sight. It’s worth noting, however, that when he was just running in Chicago, Barack Obama offered his work running CAC as a major qualification for office:

Testimonial

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“There is one person who’s been consistent on reform issues, and that’s been John McCain.”Says who? President Bush? Dick Cheney? Mitt Romney? Sarah Palin?Nope—Barack Obama:

HT: Power Line (with thanks for a positive thought)

Wondering where John McCain’s wits went

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I’d figured that the crisis around Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be a hanging curveball right in Sen. McCain’s wheelhouse, since (as I pointed out at some length a few days ago) he’s been warning us for years that this was coming; all he really had to do was stand up and say so. Instead, we’ve seen a pretty erratic week from him. I think John Podhoretz overstates things a little, but not much, when he writes,

Substantively, this has been the worst week of John McCain’s campaign—and I mean since its beginning, in early 2007. With a perfect argument to make on his own behalf—that he saw the problems with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and called them out in 2005 while others were still angling for their largesse, and that therefore he possesses the experience and demonstrated the kind of leadership and insight that are required for the presidency—he instead flailed about. Calling for the firing of Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Chris Cox? Right there, in that act, we got a glimpse of why senators so often make bad presidential candidates. From time immemorial, senators haughtily acts as though the dismissal of executive branch officials is a form of policymaking when it is almost always the opposite—an act of scapegoating.As SEC chairman, Cox only possesses the regulatory authority granted to him by acts of Congress, i.e., by senators like McCain. Cox did not and does not possess the regulatory authority to halt the creation of the poorly collateralized securities that nearly brought Wall Street down last week. But the naming and pursuit of villains was McCain’s gut instinct last week, as he seemed to attempt to don Teddy Roosevelt’s mantle as the crusader against “malefactors of great wealth.”

This sort of thing is the reason why so many of us on the conservative side have long had reservations about Sen. McCain; that shot at Chairman Cox was completely uncalled-for, unjustified, and counterproductive. (If he really is serious about the egregious Andrew Cuomo to replace him, that would be even worse.) I don’t think it’s really likely that he will “blow the debate and lose the election” as a consequence, even if he doesn’t snap out of grandstanding mode and “start talking like a serious-minded person with a sophisticated sense of the stakes” again, since I don’t think Barack Obama will be in a position to take any real advantage if he doesn’t; but he certainly won’t help himself any—and of greater importance, he won’t be doing the country any favors either.

My favorite Justice

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I meant to post this months ago, back when Phil first posted these on The Thinklings, but somehow or other I forgot to do so. I have tremendous admiration for Justice Antonin Scalia as a brilliant moral and legal thinker, a man of deep and strong principles, and a Catholic of deep Christian faith. I also appreciate his wit, and from what I’ve seen of him, I think he’d be an enjoyable and fascinating person to know. He is, of course, unpopular with the Left, since a) they don’t agree with him on much and b) he doesn’t pull his punches (and in fact, he often lands them pretty hard); but like him or hate him, he’s truly one of the major figures in the history of American constitutional jurisprudence, and so deserves to be considered and understood on his own terms.

The speech they wouldn’t let Sarah Palin give

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is a splendid piece of work; I suspect part of the reason the Obama campaign didn’t want her to give it is that it would have done a lot to burnish her foreign policy and national security credentials in the minds of anyone who heard it. Kudos to the New York Sun for posting the speech text in full.Update: The Jerusalem Post has published an excellent analysis of Gov. Palin’s speech and of the effects of her disinvitation, which is well worth your time. I was particularly struck by the concluding paragraph, which is clearly intended as a hammer blow:

[The Jewish Democrats who disinvited Palin] should be ashamed. The Democratic Party should be ashamed. And Jewish American voters should consider carefully whether opposing a woman who opposes the abortion of fetuses is really more important than standing up for the right of already born Jews to continue to live and for the Jewish state to continue to exist. Because this week it came to that.