Mike Bloomberg has served city and country well over the past seven years. To mention just a few of his accomplishments with the city government: he has restored New York's economy and sense of stability, cut crime, pushed growth and tourism into the outer boroughs, put the city on track to be a model of sustainability, encouraged common-sense solutions at the national level, and broke down some important partisan divides. Not bad for two terms.

But two terms is enough. Bloomberg now wants to tear down term limits so he can have a third. As recently as three years ago, he called this idea "a disgrace."

When Bloomberg was first elected, Rudy Giuliani tried to make the case that he should be allowed to extend his term after the September 11th attacks.

I'm very supportive of term limits in general. But what really riles me up in this case is Bloomberg's attempt to extend his tenure at a moment of fear at the national and municipal levels.

This may or may not be cynical -- Bloomberg may actually believe he's uniquely qualified to lead the city through this crunch, and he may well be. It doesn't matter. Crisis points are the worst times to change political rules, especially when those changes result in more concentrated power (See also: Bush Administration, First Term).

If term limits need to be revisited (and I don't think they do), they should be discussed when heads are cooler. The worst thing we can do at a moment of panic is throw out our carefully considered political foundations.

-- Scott Paul

The question of how and when the United States should promote democracy abroad rose to the forefront of our nation's foreign policy discourse following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and reached its apex in President Bush's Second Inaugural Address.

In light of the recent focus on the domestic political systems of states in the Middle East and elsewhere, it is helpful to trace the roots of democracy promotion in American foreign policy.

In an unusually cogent lecture delivered at the New America Foundation last week, New America Foundation Whitehead Senior Fellow Michael Lind demonstrated that unlike other imperial leaders, the goal of every American president from Washington to Eisenhower was not to maximize American power, but to create an international environment in which America's liberal, democratic way of life could flourish.

Lind explained that Woodrow Wilson's frequently quoted declaration that the world must be made "safe for democracy" is often misunderstood. Rather than suggesting that the United States promote democracy throughout the globe, Wilson advocated the maintence of a stable international environment safe enough for the United States and other nations to afford the luxuries of personal freedoms, democratic representation, and limited government.

Tonight, I spoke at a forum in Vienna at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue. The topic I was speaking on was "Electing the American President: Do New Media, Blogs and the Internet Make any Difference?"

About 200 people attended. The place was packed; a really terrific, impressive group of young people represented about half the audience. I had a great time, but I have to admit that somewhat like Barack Obama in the debate last Friday (from my perspective -- which was not seemingly that of much of the debate viewing audience), I sort of choked and wandered in the first part of my talk and got better in the latter half. The Q&A moderated by the insightful Austrian journalist and blogger Robert Misik got me back on track and helped put the evening in positive territory.

But back to rambling for a moment.

George W. Bush will address the country (and world) at 7:45 am EST Tuesday morning.

Global markets are falling in the aftermath of the single largest point drop of the New York stock exchange in American history.

There is no bail-out deal for the American financial sector, and global credit markets are choking up. The banking and financial industries will be brought to their knees in the coming days -- but at the same time, I think that we are seeing a punctuation point marking the end of America's role as the world's consumption engine.

The quality of life for the average American will decline, but the trend towards more and more capital dependence on other nations is probably going to begin to reverse itself -- or at least significantly slow.

And ironically, this financial disaster will end the war in Iraq and limit significantly the choices that both Obama and McCain might have before them as President.

It also means that all of the other great 21st century challenges out there -- from global poverty assistance to an imposed carbon tax on fossil fuel energy consumption -- will get less action and less "national investment" than those advocating federal action hoped for.

America will have no choice but to add to its cumulative debt -- and to invest in itself, particularly national infrastructure -- as a way to keep Americans working and to stimulate important parts of the near and long term real economy.

George W. Bush's demands early in his administration for unprecedented powers and budgetary authority amidst unprecedented secrecy and non-transparent government was never effectively challenged by the Congress that should have fought for its own constitutional prerogatives nor knocked back in any real way by the full force of the Democratic Party.

But now the marketplace of power in the world and of the global financial order has brought this administration to a devastating conclusion to its influence -- and Americans are going to pay a long-term price for the reckless stewardship of America's economic and security portfolios by this administration.

-- Steve Clemons

Sunday in the Los Angeles Times, an excerpt ran of a new book that was partly sponsored by the New America Foundation/American Strategy Progam titled America and the World: Conversations on the Future of U.S. Foreign Policy with Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and David Ignatius.

On the same subject, I recently hosted former National Security Advisors Brzezinski and Scowcroft for a meeting which is watchable above.

And Michiko Kakutani gave the book an outstanding review in the New York Times.

I hope that folks buy it -- and read it. It's an excellent primer on the strategic choices facing the U.S. and how these challenges should be faced.

From the LA Times selection, I found this bit most compelling:

Ignatius: Brent, how would you lead off in assessing the nature of our problem? What's broken in our ability to respond?

Brent Scowcroft: I look at the world in much the same way Zbig does. But let me start from a more historical background. I think the end of the Cold War marked a historical discontinuity in the world environment.

The Cold War was an intense concentration on a single problem. It mobilized us. It mobilized our friends and allies against a single bloc. It affected our thought processes. It affected our institutions, everything we did. I don't know if there's ever been a time we were more concentrated.

And suddenly, historically in the blink of an eye, that world came to an end, and it was replaced by a world without the existential threat of the Cold War. If we made a mistake, we might blow up the planet -- that was gone. Instead, there were 100 pinprick problems. Instead of looking through one end of the telescope, at Moscow, we were looking through the other end at this myriad of little problems. And we were dealing with them with thought processes and institutions geared for that one end of the telescope.

Ignatius: What was it like to sit in the White House in a world where the great fear was nuclear annihilation?

Scowcroft: There was the ever-present thought that if either side made a serious mistake, it could be catastrophic for humanity. Did we spend all our waking moments thinking about that? No. But it was a combination of that and a struggle to understand what the Soviets were up to, and what was their capability of, for example, a technological development that could suddenly make us vulnerable, and change this standoff to an asymmetry.

Ignatius: Zbig, what did it feel like for you to be in the cockpit?

Brzezinski: Well, one of my jobs was to coordinate the president's response in the event of a nuclear attack. I'm not revealing any secrets, but it was something like this: We would have initial warning of an attack within one minute of a large-scale launch by the Soviet Union. Roughly by the second minute we'd have a pretty good notion of the scale and the likely targets. By the third minute, we would know more or less when to anticipate impact and so forth. By the third minute, the job of the national security advisor was to alert the president that this was ongoing, that we have this information. And the president then decides how to respond.

It begins to get complicated immediately. If it's an all-out attack, the response is presumably easier. You just react in total. But suppose it's a more selective attack. There are choices to be made. The president is supposed to weigh the options. How will he react? There's an element of uncertainty here. In any case, the process is to be completed roughly by the seventh minute. By which time -- I assume this was roughly the same with you guys, right?

Scowcroft: So far, uh-huh.

Brzezinski: By the seventh minute, the order to execute had to be transmitted and whatever we decided had to be carried out. Roughly by the 28th minute, there's impact. That is to say, you and your family are dead. Washington's gone. A lot of our military assets are destroyed. But presumably, the president has calmly made the decision how to respond. We're already firing back. Six hours later, 150 million Americans and Soviets are dead. That is the reality we lived with. And we did everything we could to make it as stable, as subject to rational control, as possible. To be nonprovocative but also to be very alert and determined so that no one on the other side could think they could pull it off and survive.

It's very different now. I think Brent has described it very well -- 100 pinpricks. The new reality is a kind of dispersed turbulence. And that requires, I think, a different mind-set, a more sophisticated understanding of the complexity of global change.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

Well, you'll get more than Mozart -- but if you love music and want to visit one of the funkiest cafes and restaurants -- visit Santo Spirito in Vienna.

I enjoy the website for the music (actually it's the same selection over and over again) -- just makes the world seem better -- despite America's nation's moral, military, and economic implosion which I can see in more clear outline from abroad.

If you meet the owner, he's gruff. You have to basically prove to him both that you are into the music and aren't a snob for him to take you seriously. It's a great place.

-- Steve Clemons

I spoke to former World Bank Chief Economist and Initiative for Policy Dialogue President Joseph Stiglitz on Saturday by phone, and he shared with me many of the same points that he does in this excellent article, "A Better Bailout," on how we needed to structure a financial markets action plan.

He shared a number of concerns with me about the administration's approach to the financial crisis -- but the biggest concern he had was that Paulson was trying to stick the U.S. taxpayer with all of the consequences of Wall Street's recklessness and give financial firms squeaky clean portfolios that they could then float up -- again taking huge financial gains for themselves.

From his piece:

The administration is once again holding a gun at our head, saying, "My way or the highway." We have been bamboozled before by this tactic. We should not let it happen to us again. There are alternatives. Warren Buffet showed the way, in providing equity to Goldman Sachs.

The Scandinavian countries showed the way, almost two decades ago. By issuing preferred shares with warrants (options), one reduces the public's downside risk and insures that they participate in some of the upside potential. This approach is not only proven, it provides both incentives and wherewithal to resume lending. It furthermore avoids the hopeless task of trying to value millions of complex mortgages and even more complex products in which they are embedded, and it deals with the "lemons" problem - the government getting stuck with the worst or most overpriced assets.

Finally, we need to impose a special financial sector tax to pay for the bailouts conducted so far. We also need to create a reserve fund so that poor taxpayers won't have to be called upon again to finance Wall Street's foolishness.

If we design the right bailout, it won't lead to an increase in our long-term debt - we might even make a profit. But if we implement the wrong strategy, there is a serious risk that our national debt - already overburdened from a failed war and eight years of fiscal profligacy - will soar, and future living standards will be compromised.

The president seemed to think that his new shell game will arrest the decline in house prices, and we won't be faced holding a lot of bad mortgages. I hope he's right, but I wouldn't count on it: it's not what most housing experts say. The president's economic credentials are hardly stellar. Our national debt has already climbed from $5.7 trillion to over $9 trillion in eight years, and the deficits for 2008 and 2009 - not including the bailouts - are expected to reach new heights. There is no such thing as a free war - and no such thing as a free bailout. The bill will be paid, in one way or another.

Perhaps by the time this article is published, the administration and Congress will have reached an agreement. No politician wants to be accused of being responsible for the next Great Depression by blocking key legislation. By all accounts, the compromise will be far better than the bill originally proposed by Paulson but still far short of what I have outlined should be done.

No one expects them to address the underlying causes of the problem: the spirit of excessive deregulation that the Bush Administration so promoted. Almost surely, there will be plenty of work to be done by the next president and the next Congress. It would be better if we got it right the first time, but that is expecting too much of this president and his administration.

The bailout proposal which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is calling a "buy-in" plan is better than the first Paulson plan.

I haven't reviewed all of the details, but I do know that the U.S. government receives warrants in the firms in which it is supporting, which allows participation in the upside that these firms will get by the U.S. accepting the risk of the toxic mortgage portfolios held by financial institutions. CEOs that get bailed-out have compensation caps of $500,000. It's strange to think that is a healthy number -- but on a relative basis I guess it is.

Here are some of the provisions of the plan and a summary in pdf form. (section by section analysis and separately, a summary)

I haven't been able to deduce whether the "encouragement" of the U.S. to financial institutions and mortgage holders to keep people in their homes during this mess is only encouragement -- or whether there is some hard edge to this. Others may want to comment on this aspect.

I feel that Wesley Clark was right when he told me that we have to stop the deterioration of neighborhoods that has come with the rampant foreclosures -- and have to give families who are the victims in this crisis as much time as the banks and financial institutions to stabilize and see if their "own life portfolios" can float upward with time.

-- Steve Clemons

Taxi to the Dark Side is going to run tonight on HBO, 9 pm EST.

If you haven't seen it, the Oscar winning documentary by Alex Gibney is a must see.

Here are a few short clips of interviews I did with some of those featured in the film. The first (above) is with SPC Damien Corsetti about his experiences at Bagram Prison and FBI special agent and interrogator Jack Cloonan.

Others follow:

Steve Clemons interviews Alex Gibney

Steve Clemons interviews former State Department Chief of Staff and long term aide to Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson on military code of conduct

-- Steve Clemons

Arrived in Vienna.

The airplane chatter I eavesdropped on during my Austrian Airlines flight -- much of it in Russian -- was about the American financial crisis.

-- Steve Clemons

It's amazing that the young, talented, got-everything-he-wanted Paul Newman turned into the globally aware and socially concerned activist he became.

On a number of levels, I think that Matt Damon -- and even Ben Affleck -- resemble at their young age Paul Newman in spirit and human conscientiousness.

I tried last year to engineer a request from ABC White House Correspondent Ann Compton to Paul Newman to serve as Master of Ceremonies of the 2008 White House Correspondents Dinner.

Newman would have pulled no punches but still would have been a gentleman. He was too ill to do the dinner, but had he been able to, America and George W. Bush would never have forgotten it.

I encountered Newman a few times in person in my life -- but had a pretty long and deep conversation with him in 1985 about Ronald Reagan who he thought was institutionalizing national disregard for those in need. At the time, Reagan's policies had led to many mentally ill and schizophrenic patients ending up on America's streets -- and Newman was livid about what was happening to the country's soul.

He was a great man and was committed to getting America and Americans on a better path.

-- Steve Clemons

I've been watching it over and over and over again.

Words fail me in this case. What can one say when it's so clear that Sarah Palin is not prepared for the office she is seeking.

Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker has perhaps said it all -- and kudos to Parker for taking the risks she obviously has with this commentary.

-- Steve Clemons

I'm off to Europe today and will be mostly in Vienna and Salzburg.

Quite pleasantly, I have been invited by the Department of State to talk about foreign policy, the elections, and the role of new media. I'll be active on TWN but so will others on our team.

On another front, I just read a fabulous oped draft by another policy player in Washington -- and I can't wait for it to be published somewhere so that I can link it here. The author makes a compelling case for why at least one famous neoconservative would make a principled decision to support Barack Obama. It's really interesting -- and when it makes it out into public -- I will share it.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

Glad Jim Lehrer started with Eisenhower and the missive that national security is a strong economy. . .

Obama: And. . .and. . .and. He was halting, ineffective, and stumbling in his response on the economy.

McCain: Shouts out to Kennedy. Odd, but OK... McCain mentions "accountability and oversight" -- but where is the accountability and oversight for what has happened?

Obama says when asked whether he supports a plan. . ."we haven't seen the language yet. . ." Weak answer....and now he's moving to the question of accountability. His response is falling into the same grooves of how he normally responds to his early opposition to the Iraq invasion -- now he's saying that he's been on the case of this economic crisis for a long time as well.

McCain is doing some "I warned too" stuff. . .on Freddie and Fannie. But McCain has now leaped back to Eisenhower. And he repeats the call for the resignation of Chris Cox. Of course he didn't call for Cox's resignation last week; rather McCain said that if he was President he would fire Chris Cox.

Why is Obama so nervous? So halting in his speaking?

I don't like it when Obama takes a swipe at lobbyists. I know some do, but it just seems so insincere to me. Obama's team is surrounded by lobbyists.

McCain is not really answering the questions.

LOL....McCain says we have to get spending under control. And it's his team that has built the massive spending machine that we have -- and it's his team that has initiated and presided over a war without raising taxes.

Obama is hard to listen to tonight. I'm surprised. He's usually smoother. He's nervous, rough -- halting. He is speaking in Hemingway sentences with a lot of And and Uh tying his staccato thoughts together.

McCain sounds smoother and is selling better even though their substance differs.

My definition of rich?? McCain asks about Obama's definition of rich?

Ugh...I am hating this debate. They are not connecting with us, with real people, while the economic and national security portfolios of the nation are badly deflating. They are spouting talking points that are oddly disconnected from what is going on in the real world.

Both are guilty of a disconnection from the real world -- at least I think they are because Obama is hard to follow with his extremely hiccuppy delivery. . .

Lehrer takes us back to the rescue package and what Obama and McCain will have to give up.

Obama is fudging it by saying he doesn't know what the revenues will be. His priorities are energy independence -- a ten year plan to get independent from foreign oil. That appears to be mission one.

Secondly, Obama said health care is his next priority. Third, competitiveness -- education in science, math, engineering. And lastly, rebuilding infrastructure -- roads bridges, broadband, and more.

Obama's speaking cadence is getting better -- and he's absolutely right on infrastructure.

McCain's response -- cut spending....just cut spending. He wants to do away with ethanol subsidies and wants to do away with cost plus contracts in defense system contracts. McCain didn't mention what Obama did: energy investment, education, health care, and infrastructure.

Wow. McCain only talked about cutting -- mentioned ZILCH about new investment or adjusted priorities.

Lehrer challenges both saying that McCain and Obama are essentially just ignoring the impact of the economic crisis and just digging into embedded views on their policy plans that they had before the economic crisis.

McCain is pushing nuclear power. I don't happen to be opposed to nuclear energy -- but someone needs to push McCain on what kind of regulatory regime he would support on nuclear energy plant development. Hopefully, he's moved beyond his previous flamboyant support for the minimalist regulatory stance he had on the financial industry as a model for other industries.

Obama is finally getting a little smoother....finally.

How is John McCain going to support a financial bail-out bill of any kind given what he's saying on spending? How can McCain be for supporting providing a massive cash injection to the financial sector and not be for supporting any other of America's public goods challenges for regular people?

LOL. . .I just noticed that Barack Obama is wearing a flag on his lapel and McCain must have forgotten his. But let's not go down the flag lapel road again. . .

Obama is back to his weird speaking cadence again. Help?!!? I just don't get it. Speak in sentences. . . smooth ones. He's trying to pack in too many cliches.

McCain, talking about Iraq, is resolute, confident, clear. Even though I think he's wrong, McCain can communicate.

Obama is having a tough time communicating.

Yikes. McCain just mentioned the factoid that Senator Obama had never held a hearing as Chairman of the Subcommittee on European Affairs of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This has been overplayed, but nonetheless -- that little item was first written about on The Washington Note.

Damn it! McCain just accused Obama of not knowing the difference between a tactic and a strategy. That's one of my lines -- but applied to McCain!

The embrace of the surge, of David Petraeus, is all about tactics -- not strategy!! That is what Richard Lugar, Chuck Hagel, John Kerry and others have repeatedly said when Petraeus and Crocker testified.

That line should have been used by Obama against McCain. My head hurts.

Obama is getting defensive. He's not on offense. . .not enough. McCain is getting the clever lines, even if they aren't truthful.

Obama tries to tie McCain to Bush, with whom he has voted more than 90% of the time. McCain says he's not "Miss Congeniality" and that he's battled the administration.

Nearly nothing from this debate is memorable yet.

If Obama had spent any quality time lately with General Wesley Clark, Clark would have told Obama to say: "John McCain, stop hiding behind David Petraeus!"

But alas, Clark was on the periphery of exile from Obama Land. Big mistake.

Obama says we need more troops in Afghanistan. Maybe so. That's the conventional, predictable wisdom. But it worries me that Obama thinks that victory in Afghanistan is securable through military means. It's not. We need to bribe people, invest, and link Afghanistan's economy and job base to other patrons. More troops will not win that war.

Regrettably, Obama will not say this. He's in McCain-lite mode right now, and he is better than that.

McCain is making a good point that came at the end of Charlie Wilson's War. He says we shouldn't have walked way and washed our hands from Afghanistan after the end of the Cold War and what was essentially our proxy war with the Russians there.

Did I just hear McCain rap Obama for saying he might bomb inside Pakistan to get bin Laden? And McCain was the guy singing about bombing Iran? McCain is making my blood boil with some of this stuff, but there is no doubt that his delivery is better than Obama. And unlike Obama, McCain is on the offense. He's setting the pace of the debate and framing things.

Obama is reacting, not leading.

Now Obama is defending is Pakistan statement. No one would remember what McCain just said if Obama just went after McCain for his Petraeus-hugging and his own intoxication with tactics and not strategy.

I've watched the Kennedy-Nixon debates many times and know that Kennedy's looks, poise, and articulateness beat Nixon's superior intellectual grasp of issues, his frumpiness, and his clammy, sweaty look. Tonight, neither McCain nor Obama are sweating or frumpy -- but McCain is selling, and he looks stable and sounds clear. Obama, I hate to say, is defensive, speaking in halting ways, seems uncomfortable, using too many cliches, and is tilting towards amateurism on the dial.

I hope his team is reading this -- as I'm hopeful that they will take this constructive, honest commentary and help Obama improve next round. He's not selling well. He has no lines.

By Judd Legum's terms on how to judge a debate, McCain is winning -- not by a lot, not necessarily in memorable ways -- but enough perhaps to matter.

Ok. The Iran question.

McCain, talking about the possibility of Iran getting the bomb, says we can't allow a second Holocaust. McCain is pushing the fear button, and it disgusts me.

And now McCain is pushing the biggest new neocon Trojan Horse: the concert of democracies. Obama has to blast this to pieces. Will he? Or will he play McCain-lite here too?

Obama plays defense again on whether or not the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is a terrorist organization. And now he's just agreeing with McCain on the impossibility of letting Iran get nuclear weapons capacity.

But Obama did give a good response. . .finally. He said we need Russia and China, two nations that are not democracies -- and that he supports direct engagement with Iran. That is the right answer. But he needs to work on selling it better. It left nothing memorable.

McCain is now hitting Obama for his willingness to engage America's enemies. Obama is right to embrace an engagement strategy.

On this issue, for the first time in this debate, Obama is speaking confidently, smoothly, clearly. Finally. On the issue of meeting world leaders without pre-conditions. And Obama cited McCain advisor Henry Kissinger for helping to make this kind of approach the standard way America has dealt with problem nations in the world.

John McCain just said that Henry Kissinger has been his friend for 35 years.

When a journalist friend of mine and I recently asked Henry Kissinger at an Atlantic Council dinner why he was supporting John McCain, Kissinger said "because John McCain has been my friend for 20 years."

Bunk. Debunk.

WHY ISN'T JIM LEHRER ASKING OBAMA AND McCAIN WHETHER IT IS WISE TO WAGE WARS WITHOUT RAISING TAXES TO PAY FOR THEM?

These Russia-Georgia exchanges are making me frustrated. How given the state of the American economy and the national security position America is in do we have any ability to pontificate about Russia's global behavior? We need to change the game in order to have influence on other big global players.

But Georgia shot first. Neither has the guts to say this. It turns my stomach that Obama is defending Saakashvili.

No one is going to remember that McCain tried to duck this debate.

Now Obama is doing a lot of Pentagon-hugging. He wants missile defense. Likes it. Gotta have it. Right up there next to energy, infrastructure, health care, and education.

John McCain does not look at Obama - he just doesn't look at him. He sort of just keeps looking at Lehrer, the camera and the audience.

Obama keeps looking at McCain. . .constantly!

Obama looks like he wants approval, acceptance -- and McCain gives the impression that he doesn't give a damn and he's going to do all he can to run Obama into the ground.

I am so frustrated with this debate. I don't like McCain's policy answers and positions, but he's controlling this exchange. Obama has had his moments -- particularly when talking about meeting foreign leaders. . .but the rest of the time has been dominated by John McCain saying "Senator Obama doesn't understand. . ." or "Senator Obama doesn't get it. . ."

McCain has said this over and over and over again. Obama has played defense.

John McCain: "I don't need on the job training." My view is that McCain knows how to drive an older vehicle -- but not the America we have today.

Obama -- My dad came from Kenya. I had a tough life. We put it together in America.

McCain: I know how to heal the wounds of war. I know how to deal with our adversaries. I know how to deal with friends.

Over the mic, we hear both say "good job" to the other.

McCain won the debate in my view -- but I don't think it was a definitive slaughter. Obama held his own on a number of fronts, but he wasn't in control.

McCain set the pace, cadence. He provoked Obama and kept saying Obama didn't understand what was going on. Obama hardly attacked McCain with anything memorable at all.

Others will spin as they will -- but this was a really surprising encounter as far as I'm concerned. I thought Obama would trounce McCain, and it didn't come near to that.

-- Steve Clemons

I have a long roster of McCain statements that Obama spokesman Bill Burton just sent to me and which he says needed to be debunked. I've created an html document of the list here.

And. . .John McCain's spokesman Brian Rogers has sent me a web portal to a roster of Obama statements that they have debunked.

Bunk. Debunk. Bunk. Debunk. . .

-- Steve Clemons

This is a guest post by Judd Legum, who previously served as Research Director for Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign and was a creator of "Think Progress" at the Center for American Progress. This post originally appeared at Huffington Post and is cross-posted with permission.

There were 23 debates during the Democratic primary and part of my job on the Hillary campaign was to monitor the post-debate reaction in the media. I watched hundreds of self-described political experts instantly declare who won and who lost.

Here's what I learned: the pundits are full of it. They don't know any more than you do and many of them have a vested interest in tilting the scales one way or another. After the debate ends, if you want to know who won, turn off the TV. You can figure it out for yourself.

The first thing to understand is that the winner of the debate isn't the person who makes the best arguments. If it was, Al Gore would be finishing up his second term. The winner of the debate is the person who moves votes to their side. You can figure out who that will be by focusing on these three factors:

1. 30 seconds are more important than 90 minutes. Although tens of millions of people will watch the debate, most everyone will forget the bulk of it immediately. The lasting impression of the debate for most voters will be the two or three exchanges -- usually less than 15 seconds long -- that are replayed, discussed, and analyzed over and over again. More often than not, whoever gets the best of these moments wins the debate.

For example, in the Des Moines Register debate in mid-December, Obama was asked a pretty tough question: How he could rely on so many former Clinton advisers and still represent a break from the past? Hillary laughed and said, "I want to hear that!" Obama flashed a smile and shot back: "Hillary, I'm looking forward to you advising me as well." It was a pitch-perfect response and catnip for the media, which played the exchange repeatedly for days. Overall, Hillary turned in a very solid performance and demonstrated an impressive command of the issues. But it didn't matter. Obama had won the key 15 seconds and it gave him a critical boost just days before the Iowa caucus.

John Edwards was generally regarded as an excellent debater. So why was it that the debates never seemed to help him much in the polls? He never really did anything memorable. (Quick: name one line Edwards said in a primary debate.) His answers were always smooth, coherent and on message. It didn't do him any good.

Identify who got the better of two or three most memorable exchanges between Obama and McCain and you'll be a long way toward identifying the winner.

2. Mistakes matter, but only some of them. Probably the worst mistake in the Democratic primary debates was Hillary's famous non-answer to a question about drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants. But it wasn't a big mistake because people care deeply about the issue. (When is the last time you've heard driver's licenses mentioned on the campaign trail?) It was important because it fit into a pre-exisiting narrative about Hillary that had been developed by her opponents for some time. Namely, that Hillary is politically calculating and dishonest. Since it reinforced a pre-exisiting narrative it caused Hillary immense damage and sent the campaign into a tailspin from which it never fully recovered.

During the next debate in Nevada, Obama was asked a similar question about drivers licenses for illegal immigrants and gave a similarly meandering answer. Yet, he paid no political price. The reason is simple: no one believed at the time that Obama was dishonest or politically calculating. So a mistake that was debilitating for Hillary was a non-issue for Obama.

In this debate, a mistake on an economic issue will be more damaging to McCain because there is a pre-existing narrative that he isn't knowledgeable or engaged on the economy. Similarly, a mistake on foreign policy would be more damaging to Obama because there is a pre-existing narrative that he may not have the experience to be commander-in-chief.

3. It is a popularity contest. At the end of the day these candidates are trying to get voters to like them. As a result, in many instances, what the candidates say is far less important than how they say it.

During the spring and summer, Obama struggled to gain traction in debates because the delivery of his answers were perceived as detached and professorial. In other words, the things he was saying were smart but he wasn't making friends. In an August debate, Hillary won a lot of admirers when she said with a smile: "For fifteen years, I have stood up against the right-wing machine and I've come out stronger. So if you want a winner who knows how to take them on, I'm your girl!"

The person who is the most relaxed and getting some laughs is usually the winner.

The reason why much of the punditry that follows the debate is inaccurate or irrelevant is that many of the people involved are far more interested in shaping the outcome of the debate than reflecting it. It usually doesn't work, but most give it a shot anyway.

You can do a lot better by thinking for yourself.

-- Judd Legum

I have just flown back from Chapel Hill, North Carolina and am now in D.C. -- about to watch the first debate showdown.

On other fronts, Ted Kennedy has been taken to the hospital in Hyannisport, Massachusetts. No other news.

I hope Kennedy gets better quickly -- but I can't help but think that Reagan's funeral gave George W. Bush a platform that helped him reverse his free fall in the polls in the 2004 race and stage a reorganization of his campaign and brand.

Obama is in no free fall, but I have no doubt that the passage of great figures whether in the Republican or Democratic party are exploited political moments.

-- Steve Clemons

I'm not kidding.

Paraguay President Fernando Lugo, while attending both the United Nations General Assembly meetings and the Clinton Global Initiative, shared with friends over dinner some of the other meetings he had been having in New York.

He met this head of state. . .and that head of state. . .and so on. . .

. . .but then the room went silent and then broke into subdued laughter when he confided that he was approached about meeting with GOP Vice Presidential candidate and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

President Lugo turned the meeting down.

With all due respect to Paraguay and its great citizens, something is really wrong when the Paraguayan President won't even hang with Palin.

But note to world leaders, PLEASE start meeting with her.

Otherwise, she'll never get any credible international experience.

-- Steve Clemons

Here is TWN Contributor Nir Rosen's latest article on Iraq that ran in "The National" on 26 September 2008.

We Run the Road

Nir Rosen reports from Majd al Anjar, where the rage of young men mixes with the sectarian fervour spilling over Iraq's borders.

On May 12, a few days after street fighting erupted in Beirut, I drove to Majd al Anjar, a Sunni stronghold in Lebanon's Bekaa, close to the Syrian border, where gunmen were still blocking the motorway from Beirut to Damascus.

At the edge of town, several hundred men with automatic rifles, rocket propelled grenade launchers, pistols and hand grenades stood before earthen barriers and fires. Some wore masks. There was nobody in command - this was a mob, not a militia. The men were angry, afraid, suspicious, shouting at strangers and each other, each one an authority unto himself, carelessly swinging weapons around, oblivious to where they were pointing. Some rested the barrels of their rifles on top of their feet, a sign they had no professional training.

I am at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill this morning joining a panel titled "Cuba and the United States: Historical Perspectives, Political Prospects." (last night I discovered a new drink, the blackberry mojito)

The conference, "The United States & Cuba: Rethinking Engagement" is sponsored by the Institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

If you are into Cuba policy, some giants are here including former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson, former American Interests Section Director in Havana and Center for International Policy Senior Fellow Wayne Smith, National Security Archive Latin America project director Peter Kornbluh, Lissa Weinman of the World Policy Institute, Kirby Jones of the US-Cuba Trade Association, Phil Peters of the Lexington Institute, Geoff Thale of the Washington Office on Latin America, William LeoGrande at American University, Sarah Stephens of the Center for Democracy in the Americas, Al Fox of the Alliance for Responsible Cuba Policy Foundation, and others.

Cuba matters -- but I don't have the time on the blog this morning to lay out my particular case as I'm speaking shortly.

However, my remarks this morning will build on those from a forum I did recently with the Nixon Center in Washington titled "What Would Nixon Do on Cuba?"

This was a great forum featuring Nixon Center President Dimitri Simes, Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Julia Sweig, former Bush administration senior National Security Council official Flynt Leverett, and former Colin Powell aide Lawrence Wilkerson.

I'll also be reflecting on the comments that Brent Scowcroft, co-author of the recently released New America Foundation/Basic Books release, America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy, made to me:

My answer on Cuba is Cuba is not a foreign policy question.

Cuba is a domestic issue.

In foreign policy, the embargo makes no sense.

It doesn't do anything.

It's quite clear we can not starve Cuba to death.

We learned that when the Soviet stopped subsidizing Cuba and they didn't collapse.

It's a domestic issue.

Back to DC tonight to watch the "debate". Tomorrow off to Vienna, Austria.

-- Steve Clemons

The absence of a deal -- something that will pump liquidity into the financial system -- is choking global credit markets this morning.

I don't understand why the parties involved can't produce a legislative package that keeps families in their homes, that keeps the instigators of this mess from walking away with taxpayer dollars, and buys equity in troubled firms rather than just absorbing their mistakes. And that commits to national infrastructure projects to rebuild the nation and to keep those hit hardest in these times working.

The right deal would be easy to do. Paulson knows what it is -- but he's not taking the country there, adding to his share of responsibility for this growing economic debacle.

-- Steve Clemons

Don't ask where I got this.

Like Sy Hersh, I get most of my best stuff outside of D.C.

The price was very. . .high.

-- Steve Clemons

Online video chat by Ustream

Michael Lind will be joining me today live at 12:15 pm EST for a discussion of his provocative book, The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life.

Lind's book has just been released as a paperback and has received much serious acclaim in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Foreign Affairs.

Lind plans to take on both neoconservatives and liberal promoters of a concert of democracies.

Join us.

-- Steve Clemons

Just after the September 11th terrorist attacks occurred, George W. Bush went before the nation and made the case that he needed unprecedented authority -- budgetary and military -- to take on the threats poised at the well-being and safety of the country.

Now with the current economic crisis in the United States, Bush is yet again asking for unprecedented powers and budget.

What happened after 9/11?

We saw no-bid contracts given to firms like Halliburton. We saw $9 billion of U.S. taxpayer money "go missing" through the Coalition Provisional Authority. We saw abuses of power, the expansion of secrecy, and the promulgation of norms that seemed to be the very antithesis of what America stands for.

A nation's values and its deep DNA are really only knowable and observable during times of crisis -- when it's tough to stand up for codes that seem a heavy burden during tough times.

We are in a crisis again -- and the Bush administration is again asking Americans to forgo fundamental values.

Tonight, George Bush succeeded I think in scaring Americans that this crisis could be a systemic threat. Bush said "our entire economy is in danger."

That's the fear button. He pushed it. And he said the clock was ticking.

This seems like a bad episode of "24."

What is shocking about the presentation by Bush -- and the deal that is unfolding is that we don't see any acceptance of responsibility for the failure of his team's stewardship of the economy. We didn't hear acknowledgment that the compulsive deregulation mantra of Bush's political and economic allies created a massive bubble where lots of billionaires were created and now tens of millions of less fortunate Americans are holding the bill.

We didn't hear Bush say that it's time to reverse the tax cuts that he put in place to help those who have already benefited from the perverse finance and housing bubble that was pumped up.

We didn't hear a firm commitment from Bush to help the working families who hold these sub-prime and adjustable rate mortgages to stay in their homes and to help stabilize the lives of hard-hit Americans, their neighborhoods and their jobs. All the while, the macro players and big firms and their stakeholders are bailed out.

We probably do need to float major funds into the financial sector -- but there needs to be a quid pro quo written in to the deal, a new social contract that does away with the "winner takes all syndrome" that has helped rot out America's economic promise.

And we need to hear what comes after the bail out. This nation is heading into recession -- and is probably already there.

We need to trigger real growth in the real economy with real jobs -- and that's infrastructure.

We need a serious infrastructure commitment and a capital budget that helps make sure that some of this massive amount of money being let loose into the system actually gets some traction in rebuilding the nation's roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, and telecom infrastructure.

That was missing -- and it must be part of this debate.

-- Steve Clemons

When Bush-McCain super booster Jack Welch issues warnings six weeks before an election, we are all in real trouble -- no matter who wins the election.

From a Reuters/Nick Zieminski interview with Welch:

Former General Electric Co. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jack Welch said the U.S. economy faces a deep downturn in coming quarters, and he supports a proposed $700 billion government rescue package for the financial sector.

"I now believe we are in for one hell of a deep downturn," Welch told the World Business Forum in New York on Wednesday, adding that the first quarter of 2009 will likely be "brutal."

Until recently, Welch said, he had believed the U.S. economy could avoid recession, but he has changed his mind.

"I am now caving," he said. "Get ready for real tough times. They're coming. There is no credit available."

Welch said mortgage lenders, legislators, investment bankers and others are all to blame for the crisis, which stemmed from easy credit and investors' appetite for yield.

"The problem was money didn't cost anything," Welch said. "People took swings."

-- Steve Clemons

Editor's Note: Thanks to Tahoe Editor for sending this clip my way.

. . .but who's counting.

I haven't paid much attention to the various rankings and web awards out there. My blog roll is painfully out of date and need to fix that.

But each day, I try to squeeze in some blog thinking, blog posting, and blog conversations with some of my most active commenters into my real life.

I have to say though that while top ten would be better -- and congrats to Josh Marshall, Matthew Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, Olliver Willis, Arianna Huffington, Henry Farrell and many others -- top 50 is still fantastic in my book.

Thanks much to Evan Carmichael for putting out his annual roster of top political blogs and including The Washington Note.

Here again is the link to the list -- which I am encouraging folks to "Digg."

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

Senator Jeff Bingaman's support group in New Mexico used to be called (and may still be) "A Lot of Folks for Jeff Bingaman." I always liked how unpretentious the name of his PAC was.

Well. . .I have stumbled across "A Lot of Saudis and Israelis for Barack Obama." They aren't a single group -- but it's clear Obama is popular across the Middle East.

I haven't received an email video of Israelis for McCain, though I know there are some -- and I haven't received graphics that are pro-McCain and anti-Obama from Saudi Arabia. If I do, I'll consider posting them.

But I have to share the video above -- which is powerful and gripping -- of many in Israel who support Barack Obama. Beware, it triggers tears in some.

And because I don't believe in false trade-offs between the interests of Israel and its Arab neighbors, I will also post these graphics that were done by a blogger in Saudi Arabia, Bandar Raffah.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

Update: I just learned that CNN Arabic covered the Obama support initiative in Saudi Arabia.

John McCain has suspended his campaign activities and is calling for Friday night's debate to be postponed so that he and his party, and Barack and his, can work on resolving the nation's financial crisis. He has called on Obama to do the same.

I think that this move is part of McCain's campaign. It's cynical and wrong.

The debates are a time to connect with Americans on issues of importance to them -- in something more than a 30-second sound bite. It's a good time to compare and contrast how the candidates view the social contract in the nation -- the role of capital, firms, workers and their families -- and of course, government.

Talking about this financial crisis and the particular approaches Obama and McCain might take deserves to be front and center of the viewing audience on Friday.

Trying to pull the plug on the debate is another way of saying that John McCain wants the flexibility to work outside the public spotlight and behind closed doors on the economic crisis.

I would argue the same thing if Obama had suggested a postponement of the debate.

And to be square, I think Obama made a major mistake by largely ignoring the Russia-Georgia conflict while he was vacationing in Hawaii. Obama should have been on line working hard to absorb the issues in that national security crisis -- and even if he didn't return from Hawaii, he should have flown in the best and brightest minds on NATO, Russia, Europe, and grand strategy that he could muster and have them meet him on the beach.

We shouldn't be too enthused with presidential candidates who want to vacation and buffer themselves when real world crises strike -- and we shouldn't tolerate a suspension of campaign activity and postponement of a vital issues-oriented debate so that our potential president can huddle in back rooms with his party colleagues in ways that public cannot scrutinize.

It's wrong -- both should be up front, on camera, talking to the nation about the great challenges we are facing.

No postponement.

-- Steve Clemons

Jim Pinkerton on the Bush administration's lack of seriousness about the convulsing economic crisis:

If the Bush administration really believed that the Paulson proposal was absolutely vital, it would be accompanied by:

a) the President's prime time speech to the nation;

b) the resignations of top administration officials who have been overseeing the situation heretofore; or

c) a tax increase, specifically, a "Tobin Tax" on speculation, perhaps balanced with a reduction in the tax rate on long-term capital gains.

But if the administration can't rouse itself to even do a), then it's obviously not that serious a situation.

The situation of Paulson himself is particularly egregious. Having been in charge at Treasury for more than two years and issued innumerable "sunny skies" forecasts, he now wants a $700 billion blank check to oversee the bailout of his once and future colleagues.

His swift exit from the scene ought to be a rock-bottom minimum requirement.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a picture of Sarah Palin being prayed over by Thomas Muthee, who according to Max Blumenthal and his sources, "gained fame within Pentecostal circles by claming that he defeated a local witch [in Kenya], Mama Jane, in a great spiritual battle, thus liberating his town from sin and opening its people to the spirit of Jesus."

I have to say I was pretty surprised when he was praying for her that Muthee said, "In the name of Jesus, in the name of Jesus, every form of witchcraft. . ."

I don't follow religious issues much, and I'm not one that has the confidence Blumenthal does in framing personal and organized spiritual activity. But I think that it is important to know whether Palin is someone who generally believes in rationality and the Enlightenment or whether she follows a very different path.

This film clip doesn't answer my question, but it does raise them to a higher order of concern for me.

The video of the May 2005 encounter at the Wasilla Assembly of God appears here, and the segment with Sarah Palin clicks in at about 7:30:

-- Steve Clemons

Live Broadcast by Ustream.TV

As previously mentioned, this morning I will be helping to chair a half day conference in the US Senate (Dirksen Senate Office Building, Room 124) on the current economic turmoil. We were able to arrange Live Streaming of the meeting.

This meeting will feature former AT&T Broadband Networks CEO and Obama economic advisor LEO HINDERY, Congressman WALTER JONES (R-NC), former Senator ERNEST "FRITZ" HOLLINGS (D-SC), emerging markets experts and New America Foundation colleagues HEIDI CREBO-REDIKER and DOUGLAS REDIKER, National Journal columnist BRUCE STOKES, Washington Post columnist and American Prospect editor-at-large HAROLD MEYERSON, International Strategy and Investment Group Senior Managing Director and frequent Nightly Business Report guest TOM GALLAGHER, Federal Home Loan Finance Board Member ALLAN MENDELOWITZ, former IBM Director of Research and SVP for Science and Technology RALPH GOMORY, author and Manufacturing Policy Project Director PAT CHOATE, American Way of Strategy author and New America Foundation colleague MICHAEL LIND, New America Foundation Economic Growth Program Director SHERLE SCHWENNINGER, among others.

The program, "Confronting Economic Meltdown" will run from 9 am until 1:45 pm EST and is sponsored by the New America Foundation Smart Globalization Initiative and Next Social Contract Initiative as well as by the Economic Strategy Institute.

Watch if you can. More later.

-- Steve Clemons

When John McCain was ahead and many Obama supporters were in the dumps, convinced that Sarah Palin would secure for the GOP four more years in the White House, I said that politics in America never goes in a straight line -- particularly lately.

At the same time, the Obama team -- which was on the verge of sorting out White House office assigments and wondering if the Bush pols were going to take the "O" keys off of keyboards -- was just inevitably inevitable, just over the top confident. That is part of what did in Hillary Clinton's campaign and overconfidence could undermine Obama.

But some quick numbers. FiveThirtyEight.com, an electoral map watcher, has Obama up 312 electoral votes over McCain at 226.

Gallup's daily tracking poll has Obama up nationally at 48% over McCain at 44%.

InTrade's prediction market, which has had McCain up for a while after Obama's big slide down from 60%, has McCain down a little at 48.3 and Obama at 50.2. But InTrade has a new electoral map feature (that I like) with Obama at 278 electoral college votes and McCain at 260.

More soon -- off to the Senate for this event on the economy.

-- Steve Clemons

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced today its roster of 2008 Fellows, each of whom receives $500,000 -- no strings attached.

Here is the roster.

They have some cool folks -- a diverse crowd, all sorts of backgrounds and ages. But not a single think tank policy blogger-entrepreneur. Not one.

-- Steve Clemons

Live video by Ustream

My favorite British barrister, Philippe Sands, will stream here at The Washington Note live at 2:30 pm EST today (7:30 pm UK time tonight).

He is appearing at the funky journalists club where I hang out in London, The Frontline Club, which was first introduced to me by journalist Yosri Fouda.

Today (tonight in London), Sands will be discussing his book, The Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values.

-- Steve Clemons

Today, I'll be up at a forum focused on the economic turmoil in the U.S. and global economies.

-- Steve Clemons

Editor's Note: Hat tip to BB for the jingle.

PublicMarkup.org has just put up Senator Chris Dodd's counter proposal on a government buy-out of non-performing and failing mortgages.

Thanks to Matt Stoller for sending my way.

-- Steve Clemons

Now after reading "Dead Treaty Walking," I see that the START Agreement with the Russians is nearing expiration with nothing to succeed it other than bluster. I also see an American economy in meltdown mode and wars against Iran and others that many supporters of Sarah Palin are eager to nudge forward.

These imposed realities all make the question of Sarah Palin's experience huge -- even more huge than the question of experience on the table before.

Obama's experience is not as full a roster as I'd like either -- but he still has her beat (as does Joe Biden) and he has worked hard to educate himself about the serious policy challenges facing the country.

PBS is hosting a poll on Sarah Palin's qualifications to be (vice) president, and a "yes" campaign is well underfoot.

I just balanced it out with my "No" vote.

Vote the way you like. . .here.

-- Steve Clemons

Below, I just posted a piece by Richard Vague, a finance expert and businessman, on the subject of whether and when the U.S. government should bail out large firms. Now I am posting another guest post by colleague and international finance expert, Douglas Rediker, who serves as Co-Director of the New America Foundation Global Strategic Finance Initiative.

I asked Rediker to respond to the news that the dollar was on the skids and oil had shot up $25/barrel.

Rediker responded:

I suspect that the markets are reacting not to the general idea of the bailout plan - which, after all was announced last week and was met with great applause by the market, but rather to the uncertainty of whether the plan will be enacted and how much political influence will creep into the final plan and implementation.

That leads to increased uncertainty, which, in turn leads to lower stock prices, higher interest rates and a lower dollar, which leads to higher commodity prices (priced in dollars). Yes, the plan will increase the US deficit, but that didn't change between Friday and today.

What changed was the perception on Friday that Hank Paulson was firmly in charge and that he knew what he was doing. Today, the fear is that Paulson has to grapple with politicians and doesn't have sweeping authority - that scares markets. Also, Paulson's only got a few more months in office and no one knows who will replace him. That adds another layer to market uncertainty.

Richard Vague just sent me this response to Rediker's note:

What is also true is that a $700 billion buyout plan means $700 billion in "newly printed money" in circulation and thus a correspondingly weaker dollar. More dollars chasing the same amount of goods means that each dollar is worth less relative to commodities and other currencies.

Vague also referred me to a relatively tepid temperature-read of the economic situation from JPMorgan Chief Investment Officer Michael Cembalest's "Eye on the Market" newsletter:

Martin Wolf at the Financial Times and editors at the Wall Street Journal apparently consider [this] the end of an era, writing things like "the day the dream of global free-market capitalism died", and "10 days that changed capitalism". I disagree with them. This is how it has always worked. Sir Robert Peel, Britain's Prime Minister in the 1840s, made it clear in the Bank of England's charter debate: while it was important to set out rules of operation for financial markets that minimized moral hazard, it was equally important that the central bank suspend those rules to take action when necessary.

As only an Englishman could write, "while the charter is well-designed and while we are taking all precautions which legislation can prudently take against the recurrence of a monetary crisis, a crisis may occur in spite of our precautions. If it does, and if it be necessary to assume grave responsibility for the purpose of meeting it, I dare say men will be found willing to assume such responsibility".

The Federal Reserve and the Treasury are acting the same way the Bank of England always did.

The events of the last week are bad for absolutists, since the U.S./U.K. model has always been about flexibility: a primary reliance on market mechanisms, but with a heavy dose of central planning and intervention in crisis. Not everything British was discarded in 1776; just the monarchy, and more fortuitously, the food.

But this not so sanguine context-setting comment came to me from businessman and Obama economic advisor Leo Hindery, who serves as Chair of the new Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation and is speaking at a forum we are organizing in the U.S. Senate tomorrow (Douglas Rediker and Richard Vague will both be there).

Hindery offers (from a set of prepared remarks he is giving tomorrow):

As we all know, the Bush administration is asking Congress to let the government buy $700 billion in troubled mortgages, which would raise the statutory limit on the national debt to $11.3 trillion from $10.6 trillion. This $700 billion is over and above the $85 billion already committed to AIG, the $29 billion related to Bear Stearns, and the very conservative $25 billion associated with the bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The solutions being proposed are the most expensive combined bailout in the nation's history and will sharply curtail the ability of the next president to push for tax cuts or new spending. And yet I believe they are not nearly enough, since they do not adequately cover the exposure associated with leveraged loans and, especially, the credit-default swaps market which has ballooned to a nearly unimaginable $45.5 trillion, from $900 billion in 2001.

This credit-default swaps market, which was developed by financiers who hired the best lobbyists they could to keep regulators away, is essentially nothing more than insurance on debt, but because there are now many more credit-default swaps outstanding than there are bonds for them to cover, it could potentially be a black hole of distress at least as large as the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Tens of trillions of dollars ago these swaps became nothing more than a way to gamble with almost no money down.

Alan Blinder suggested over the weekend that "the root cause of all of [our credit problems] is declining house prices", and he is correct - but his observation ignores the fact that to this particular root ball were grafted a lot of other financial instruments which have together grown into one heck of a tree.

Senators Kent Conrad, Byron Dorgan and Richard Shelby of Alabama, and others, were more right than wrong when they said last week that more than likely "we're talking about a trillion dollars."

I think that we are talking more than a trillion, and I suspect Leo Hindery thinks the same.

This is a real indictment of the laissez-faire, manically neoliberal political economic order that we have had in place during the Clinton and Bush eras, and the excesses that the U.S. engaged in are staggering. But I don't favor overthrowing everything -- and I don't favor a massive new over-regulated regime, but the combination of negligence as policy, turning a blind eye as policy, absence of regulation as policy -- all combined a toxic ideology -- has to be ended definitively.

As mentioned, tomorrow morning, I will be helping to chair a half day conference in the US Senate (Dirksen Senate Office Building, Room 124) on the current economic turmoil. I am not sure we will be able to Live Stream the meeting, but check back. If we can, we will. If not, it will be available later by video file and posted here.

This session which is sponsored by the New America Foundation Smart Globalization Initiative and Next Social Contract Initiative as well as the Economic Strategy Institute will feature former AT&T Broadband Networks CEO and Obama economic advisor LEO HINDERY, Congressman WALTER JONES (R-NC), former Senator ERNEST "FRITZ" HOLLINGS (D-SC), emerging markets experts and New America Foundation colleagues HEIDI CREBO-REDIKER and DOUGLAS REDIKER, National Journal columnist BRUCE STOKES, Washington Post columnist and American Prospect editor-at-large HAROLD MEYERSON, International Strategy and Investment Group Senior Managing Director and frequent Nightly Business Report guest TOM GALLAGHER, Federal Home Loan Finance Board Member ALLAN MENDELOWITZ, former IBM Director of Research and SVP for Science and Technology RALPH GOMORY, author and Manufacturing Policy Project Director PAT CHOATE, American Way of Strategy author and New America Foundation colleague MICHAEL LIND, New America Foundation Economic Growth Program Director Sherle Schwenninger, among others.

The session is open to the public if you would like to drop by.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

Richard Vague was co-founder and former CEO of First USA Bank and former CEO of Juniper Financial. He also publishes Delancey Place. Richard Vague recently spoke at the New America Foundation on the connection between the Iraq War, high oil prices, and what was happening to the US. economically. Here is a shorter clip.

Over the last several months, and especially the last few days, we have seen the Federal Government intervene in unprecedented ways to rescue or help rescue some of the largest financial institutions in our nation. This intervention has been unpredictable and has taken several different forms. The government has acted to save certain institutions--Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG. It has assisted in arranging a takeover--Bear Stearns. And it has walked away from Lehman and allowed it to fail.

In some cases it has tried to preserve some value for existing shareholders or managers, in others not. While the government officials involved have outlined some guiding principles, their actions seem to indicate that the government is improvising rather than acting from any firm set of guideposts.

I'll let others more familiar with the details debate whether the specific structures of the above-mentioned rescues were appropriate. What I'd like to discuss instead is whether in general it is good policy for our government to intervene to rescue businesses, or whether instead government should stand aside and let each of these institutions fail. My answer will lie somewhere in between.

I subscribe to the view that most bailouts of businesses are unnecessary and bad policy.

Many applauded when the government bailed out Chrysler in 1979, but since that time, U.S. automakers' share of world markets has declined from almost 80% to 45%, causing some to argue that the comfort of the bailout allowed GM and Ford to avoid the hard decisions that would have allowed them to truly compete at the level of a Toyota. And the propped-up Chrysler has remained a sickly also-ran even to this day.

But in a market nosedive, financial institutions and the liquidity they provide serve a unique and crucial role. This can be illustrated by the widely-remembered failure of Bank of United States during the Great Depression. It was allowed to fail, setting off a nationwide run on banks.

A key consequence was that many of its borrowing customers, small businesses that required working loans to operate, lost their loans from the Bank of United States and therefore failed too--even though they were solvent and ran credit-worthy businesses. For every one dollar of capital that a bank has, it can make about ten dollars in loans--with a multiplying effect on lending that is inherent to banking. But when a bank fails, and in the resulting chaos some of its loans to customers are curtailed, called or cut-off, this multiplying effect works in reverse and jobs and business activity can dramatically contract.

Financial institutions can fail even when they are profitable and have adequate capital--if they lose their own funding, either through a "run" on their deposits or if their own lenders call or do not renew their loans to that institution. In these cases, a lender of last resort can rescue that financial institution simply by supplying the missing funding until it can be restored. In this type of case, the consequence of failure on business activity are of course the same.

So rescuing lending institutions is critical. But my view is that the critical part of these institutions to preserve is the loans and other credit extended to worthy borrowers. And just because you are rescuing that part of a financial institution, it does not follow that you also have to rescue the shareholders of that institution or the senior management of that institution. Where the rescue is necessitated because of losses I would argue that you don't. And it does not mean that in due time you cannot sell or auction off the assets or components of that failed institution to other, stronger institutions. Where the rescue is necessitated because of losses I would argue that you should. But in today's world, with very complex lending instruments and derivatives thereof, it requires careful administration to make sure that credit is not inappropriately contracted so as to further damage the economy. And that takes the time that a rescue can deliver.

In the periodic financial crises that have occurred in the U.S. and Europe since the onset of the industrial age, damage has been more successfully contained and recovery has come more quickly when there has been a large institution or institutions to step in and provide liquidity to prevent financial institution failures and "runs." Institutions that have played that role in the past have included the quasi-governmental Bank of London, the old JP Morgan Bank, the New York Clearing House banks acting in concert, and more recently, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank.

Where the leading institutions have not decisively played that role during a panic, consequences have been severe--the best example being the Great Depression itself.

-- Richard Vague

A loyal TWN reader highlighted this part of the Bush administration's bail-out proposal to Congress:

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

To quote Paul Krugman in an email he sent recently, "words fail me. . ."

-- Steve Clemons

Ed. Note: Thanks to LB in Berlin for directing me to this item.

(image creator: Bandar Raffah)

This wallpaper image was created by a friend and blogger Bandar Raffah. A larger version is available here.

Guantanamo remains an obvious malignancy on America's global image.

-- Steve Clemons

(photo credit: Timothy Burger)

This photo was taken in Anchorage, Alaska on September 11th and sent in by journalist and "Suspicious Package" band member Timothy Burger.

Russia was not in sight that day.

For a slightly larger version of the photo click here.

-- Steve Clemons

Uh-oh. John McCain thought that the deregulation of the banking sector was awesome before he thought it wasn't awesome.

His enthusiasm for the success of financial market deregulation was captured by Paul Krugman in a note about McCain's intentions to apply the same approach to the health care market.

Krugman writes:

Here's what McCain has to say about the wonders of market-based health reform:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

So McCain, who now poses as the scourge of Wall Street, was praising financial deregulation like 10 seconds ago -- and promising that if we marketize health care, it will perform as well as the financial industry!

But maybe McCain is against his former position by now. . .it's that old Senator McCain vs. candidate McCain problem again.

-- Steve Clemons

Former Iraq Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi has told Iranian news sources that the U.S. is trying to engineer a deal with the Iraqi government to allow "secret bases."

From the Middle East Times:

Former Iraqi Deputy Premier Ahmad Chalabi told Iranian state-owned media Friday the United States is seeking to establish secret military bases in Iraq.

In an interview with the Islamic Republic News Agency, Chalabi, once a Washington favorite, said U.S. officials are trying to inject agreements for secret bases in Iraq as part of the long-term security contract slated to govern U.S.-Iraqi relations when the U.N. mandate there expires at the end of this year.

"Within the framework of the security pact, the United States does not wish to merely have open military bases (in Iraq), rather secret military bases (there)," he said.

He said negotiations on the deal were ongoing following the acceptance of a formal draft agreement in August but noted there were still contentious issues surrounding legal authority over U.S. military forces and the use of Iraq as a staging ground for the broader counter-terrorism effort.

I am inclined to think Chalabi is telling the truth this time. But I would like to know what his neoconservative friends like Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and Fouad Ajami think of Chalabi's chit-chats with Iran.

-- Steve Clemons

Broadcasting Live with Ustream.TV

Tonight I will be moderating a discussion with two of the most significant foreign policy observers and practitioners in America today -- Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft.

Brzezinski, who is a Trustee & Counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter. Scowcroft, who chairs the Scowcroft Group and is co-chair of the Aspen Strategy Group of the Aspen Institute, was National Security Advisor to Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush.

Tonight they and I will be discussing their new New America Foundation/Basic books release, America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy which I think is the single best book now on the market of what America needs to do to get its strategic position back into positive territory.

The two foreign policy giants recently engaged in numerous taped, moderated discussions about American national security and foreign policy with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. This book authored by Brzezinski, Scowcroft, and Ignatius is the edited product of those discussions.

The LIVE STREAMING will begin at approximately 6 pm EST and the program will run until approximately 7 pm EST.

To buy your copy of the book, go here.

I am deeply vested in this book as to some degree, it was an idea I and the New America Foundation/American Strategy Program helped hatch and produce.

I want to thank Basic Books -- all of its staff and leadership -- but also its former Editor, William Frucht, as well as Perseus CEO Frank Pearl, Basic Books President John Scherer, Basic Books Publicity Director Michele Jacob, but especially. . .

Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft -- who are not only brilliant observers of the contemporary scene but who also are essentially the Jack Lemmon and Walter Mathau of U.S. foreign policy -- as well as David Ignatius who knew how to provoke, to tease out and set the pace for an incredible, discussion and tour de force of America's current circumstances and prospects on the world stage.

More later. Watch with us.

-- Steve Clemons

Make no mistake, this is the result of a grassroots campaign, though Hillary Clinton's decision to withdraw herself in outrage surely played a major role.

This action alert found its way to me through a few different channels. It got big.

Chances are, this effort succeeded at least in part because most Jews are wary of her positions on hot button social issues. But this is significant for another reason: perhaps for the first time, an organized faction of the Jewish community has successfully served notice that hawkishness does not by endear public officials to the Jewish community.

The mainstream, silver-backed gorilla Jewish organizations have done great work over the years and continue to do so on a number of fronts, but they've been painfully out of step with the community on international affairs, particularly during the Bush administration. Now, an increasingly organized segment of American Jews is stepping up to present an alternative perspective that is far more representative of the Jewish community. It may take quite a while -- and the Palin invite withdrawal is a small step -- but I'm hopeful that the days of pandering to the Jewish vote with saber-rattling are slowly coming to an end.

-- Scott Paul

Where in the world is Spain?

-- Steve Clemons

Today, the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to CNN, "bans short selling of financial stocks on U.S. markets to "strengthen investor confidence."

Others may understand the ramifications of this better than I do, but I've done pretty well lately shorting financial sector stocks that I felt were going to collapse given what we saw unfolding in the subprime crisis. Short positions on stocks are ways to manage risk. I don't see how ending a long-term practice that is not part of the complex, synthetic derivatives market that is generating problems restores market confidence in the long run.

-- Steve Clemons

In February 2008, Senator Chuck Hagel wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, copied to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, warning that our policies with Kosovo, Serbia, and elsewhere in Europe could be brewing up a storm with Russia.

Here is the letter as a pdf, but I also post below.

Of particular note in Chuck Hagel's letter relating vaguely to autonomous provinces in Georgia:

. . .Across the board, officials are clearly concerned about the consequences -- including unintended and uncontrollable consequences -- of a Kosovar declaration of independence. This includes a former senior Russian official known for his pro-Western views, who told me that, "there is no way that one cannot view a Kosovar declaration of independence as anything but a precedent" for other similar conflicts.

Hagel also writes:

At a time when our relations with Russia are badly frayed, our military is overly engaged, we're dealing with serious fissures in NATO over Afghanistan, and European willingness to respond militarily to an outbreak of violence in Kosovo and the Balkans is uncertain, I urge you to proceed with caution, weighing carefully the potential implications of a diplomatic event that could stretch well beyond the Balkans.

We need to weigh our current policy against our strategic interests -- in the Balkans, in Europe, with Russia, and in a shared, international understanding of national sovereignty under international law. It is not at all clear to me that a unilateral settlement of Kosovo can provide a lasting, stable solution for this region. We must think through all of the complexities ofthe Kosovo issue, the grave risk of violence against Serb minorities in Kosovo, and how to avoid isolating and alienating Serbia.

This letter warns the administration that its actions in the Balkans ran the risk of triggering blowback from Russia -- and yet there is no evidence that the administration worried that Russia would exploit the model of Kosovo in other ways -- particularly as we saw Russia assert the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

While many US Senators write to the President and other cabinet officers on requests for consideration of this project or that, Chuck Hagel was regularly provoking the administration with sensible, realistic assessments about America's geostrategic choices and their consequences.

Many of these letters -- if not all -- seem to have been ignored. I have not been able as of yet to find a letter from Rice back to Senator Hagel -- but Hagel's letter is enough to show that the administration had more than adequate warning from Senate Foreign Relations Committee members that a Russia storm could be on the way.

-- Steve Clemons

Live Broadcast by Ustream.TV

Today at 4 pm EST, join us for LIVE STREAMING here at The Washington Note.

I will be chairing a session with retired four-star General and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Europe Wesley Clark for a discussion on the national security and economic crises facing America.

General Clark will be speaking at the New America Foundation on the subject "America Needs Urgent Action: No Nonsense Thoughts on America's Economic Crisis and National Security Dilemmas." The meeting will run from 4:00 pm - 5:15 pm EST.

Wesley Clark was in 2004 a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination and is an active voice in debates about America's national policy priorities.

In September 2005 and again in January 2006, Wesley Clark was the first major potential presidential candidate to advocate direct, immediate, unconditional talks and engagement with Iran. Others followed later.

Hope you can join us.

-- Steve Clemons

Those such as Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson who advocate increasing economic ties with China often argue, persuasively in my view, that China's economic development is likely to lead to political reform and a more cooperative international disposition.

Why then do these same officials refuse to acknowledge the potential benefits of engagement with Iran?

Farah Stockman's article in today's International Herald Tribune explains how the Treasury Department is actively working to prevent Iranian nationals living in Dubai from partnering with locals to start their own businesses.

The article notes that, "[The government controls] an estimated 85 percent of Iran's economy. But many of the Iranian businesses in Dubai are run by small traders from Iran's tiny, struggling private sector, which is often at odds with officials in Tehran."

These entrepreneurs seem like just the kind of outward-looking, progressive elements within Iranian society that we should be seeking to empower.

I hope that the next president takes advice from those like Flynt Leverett and others who have laid down the parameters for a policy of engagement.

-- Ben Katcher

While I'm taking pot shots at traditional media outlets (see below), I'll second this important post by Betsy Baker, which I found via TWN reader Caitlyn Antrim's invaluable Ocean Law Daily. The writer apparently just returned from her trip on the Coast Guard Icebreaker Healy and was as dismayed as I was to read this New York Times editorial, which gives readers the impression that five hostile nations are staring down gun barrels at each other across the Arctic Circle.

In fact, what's currently happening is these five countries -- Russia, Canada, Norway, Denmark, and the United States -- are using legal means to advance their interests both aggressively and fairly. All are committed to the rule of law in the Arctic, with America's absence from the Law of the Sea Convention the only gap in a universally recognized and respected legal regime.

-- Scott Paul

CNN aired a one-hour special called Sarah Palin Revealed last night. I don't love the use of the word "revealed." It's clearly sensational. But given how much shocking information about the GOP vice presidential nominee has come out this week, and how many new questions have been raised, it's really not worth complaining about.

What is worth complaining about -- or maybe laughing about -- is that this program was immediately followed by an hour of Joe Biden Revealed. Really? I mean, I'm sure Americans have plenty to learn about the senator from Delaware. But revealed? The man's been in the spotlight for well over 35 years and has been heavily scrutinized during two presidential runs. I don't think CNN uncovered a single new facet or perspective of Joe Biden's life.

I doubt the Obama-Biden campaign cares in the slightest, but it really does make CNN look silly.

-- Scott Paul

Tonight, The Washington Note and the New America Foundation are hosting a film screening of "The Battle in Seattle" -- a film about the famous anti-WTO protests.

This film has an unusual cast, including Woody Harrelson and Charlize Theron among others. It is directed by Stuart Townsend, who will be joining me tonight for a post-screening chat with a number of other labor rights advocates, including Lori Wallach of Public Citizen.

We are pretty full -- but for bloggers and media -- let me know if you would like to join us this evening at the Regal 7th Street Cinemas. I'll send more details if you are interested.

And for others, I hope to get a couple of interviews taped to share with others on TWN.

-- Steve Clemons

In this interview with former New York Mayor Ed Koch, CNN anchor Carol Costello goes after Koch and the New York Times on the story that then Wasilla Mayor Sarah Palin sought ways to possibly ban books at the local public library.

Costello says that CNN has disproved the story and that the New York Times was wrong. Was Costello up to date on the latest?

This was from a page one profile of Palin by Jo Becker, Peter S. Goodman and Michael Powell in yesterday's New York Times:

The new mayor also tended carefully to her evangelical base. She appointed a pastor to the town planning board. And she began to eye the library. For years, social conservatives had pressed the library director to remove books they considered immoral.

"People would bring books back censored," recalled former Mayor John Stein, Ms. Palin's predecessor. "Pages would get marked up or torn out."

Witnesses and contemporary news accounts say Ms. Palin asked the librarian about removing books from the shelves. The McCain-Palin presidential campaign says Ms. Palin never advocated censorship.

But in 1995, Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues that she had noticed the book "Daddy's Roommate" on the shelves and that it did not belong there, according to Ms. Chase and Mr. Stein. Ms. Chase read the book, which helps children understand homosexuality, and said it was inoffensive; she suggested that Ms. Palin read it.

"Sarah said she didn't need to read that stuff," Ms. Chase said. "It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn't even read it."

"I'm still proud of Sarah," she added, "but she scares the bejeebers out of me."

CNN can't just diss a story and say it's not true in an offhand way interviewing Ed Koch.

Where is the CNN story stating that the pressure that Palin allegedly exerted to have Daddy's Roommate removed from the shelves of the Wasilla Public Library was fabricated?

The New York Time offered witnesses. Is CNN saying that they are lying? Do they communicate this through a chatty response to Ed Koch?

Carol Costello said that CNN found that story to be false -- but I find nothing in CNN's archives to show that that is the case.

New York Times correspondent Michael Powell is not a fabricator or spin artist. Ironically, the last time I saw Michael Powell was in CNN's Grill in Denver.

Carol Costello needs to give us an update. She spent a lot of time knocking back Koch for his take on the New York Times piece.

She either owes us more of the story from CNN -- or she owes Koch and the rest of us an apology.

-- Steve Clemons

Is Tina Fey Sarah Palin? Or Sarah Palin Tina Fey?

-- Steve Clemons

I don't have time or interest in spending time attacking the pugnacious, rude, and ingnorant Sean Hannity -- but I do want to commend the American Prospect's Robert Kuttner for standing his ground and sticking to substance when Hannity was such a miserable host.

I don't care how much one disagrees with another's views, Hannity's behavior is repulsive. Most of you probably already know that.

Robert Kuttner is author of the newly published Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency. I am reading it now.

-- Steve Clemons

Heck, I stopped in Bucharest, Romania for refueling in the middle of the night. I was traveling with former Treasury Secretary and Senator Lloyd Bentsen, for Secretary of State Alexander Haig, United Technologies Chairman & CEO George David and others.

At 3 am, on hopped for a few minutes Romania's Minister of Transportation who was the brother of the guy who owned the plane we were on. He handed us a package about Romania's financial institutions and other good investments for us to consider and took off in a fleet of cars that sped across the tarmac.

I will count Bucharest on my Facebook "Where I have been" account (I did walk off the plane and stood on the runway) -- but Sarah Palin is getting some heat after saying she had been to Ireland event though she was there just to refuel.

The bigger issue that does matter is that the McCain/Palin team has been saying that she went to Iraq during her trip to see Alaska National Guard troops, but now are revising to say she did not go into Iraq. There have now been multiple revisions to the official record.

Anne Kornblut posted this response from the Obama campaign:

"The McCain campaign said Governor Palin opposed the Bridge to Nowhere, but now we know she supported it. They said she didn't seek earmarks, but now we know she hired a lobbyist to get millions in pork for her town and her state. They said she visited Iraq, but today we learned that she only stopped at the border. Americans are starting to wonder, is there anything the McCain campaign isn't lying about?"

It was Palin's first big international trip. Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, Dubai, Iran. . .they all sound so similar.

We shouldn't be giving her such a hard time. She was just a little lost and confused.

-- Steve Clemons

Thank you, Dan Froomkin. Froomkin writes at the Washington Post's "White House Watch" and also at Nieman Watchdog.

Froomkin captured something I have been feeling but haven't quite articulated in a post he sent me last night.

He suggests we have entered a period politically when facts just don't matter anymore, at least to a large enough part of the public that the reality-based community seems like a shrinking minority.

But I like the alternative framing that Froomkin suggests as a way to measure a candidate's views and positions. This is all very Scowcroftian, with a twist of Hagel, and I like it:

~ Call this the Bush Memorial Question: How reality-based is the candidate? Does he acknowledge unpleasant realities? Does he think he makes his own reality, and that asserting something that isn't true will sort of make it true? Does he hold many beliefs - say, about Iraq or the economy - that most objective observers would say are not realistic?

~Does the candidate say things that the people covering him know he doesn't believe? For instance, is it obvious to everyone in the traveling press corps that he is repeating a line his speechwriters or pollsters have written for him, even though he knows full well it's not true.

~Is the candidate exposed to dissenting views - either in public or within his campaign? Does he encourage dissenting views? How hard does the campaign work to keep dissenters out of his way?

~Is the candidate ever willing to try to make his case in front of people who don't already agree with him? Is he willing to engage them? Does he tailor his speeches to specific audiences in order so that they will like what they hear? Or so that they will open their minds to views they may not initially share?

~How does he respond to people who don't share his views? Does he dismiss them? Does he try to persuade them? Does he listen?

-- Steve Clemons

(Suffragist Susan B. Anthony)

Despite the superficial celebration by some and criticism by others that George W. Bush says that he doesn't read many of America's leading papers, the 43rd President of the United States reads a great deal of quality work.

Besides issuing occasional reading lists of what he is powering through, President Bush has impressed me on three significant occasions with regard to what he was reading.

The first occurred in March 2001 when I learned that Bush had spent part of a weekend reading Robert Kaplan's Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus. Bush had taken the book with him to Camp David and read it during a weekend committed to preparing for a meeting with then Japan Prime Minister Yoshir Mori -- dubbed the NPL Summit (NPL referred to Japan's massive problems with non-performing loans and a stalled economy, which ironically seems to be the case in America today).

Then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was nudging Bush towards a neo-realist view of America's foreign policy position and called Robert Kaplan to come in and offer Bush several "tutorials" on what a realist would do during a time of transition in the international system. As part of Bush's prep work, he thoroughly read Tartary and had it annotated with his own scribbles and many pages earmarked.

Kaplan's book is a quite good, original treatment of the Middle East and Caucasus -- but it's also heavy stuff, not very well designed for readers with attention deficit disorder or those who need a lot of pictures to lure them through.

On another occasion, I heard Bush on C-Span with Brian Lamb discussing what he was reading. Bush referred to Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton, a book I have read thoroughly twice and which won not only that year's Pulitzer Prize but also the Washington Prize, the largest cash award for founding era histories partly governed by Washington College's C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience on which I sit on the Advisory Council.

Bush knew the Hamilton book. I knew he knew it from his discussion with Brian Lamb and his confident, specific references to nuanced parts of the book that would not have been easy for someone who had been handed just crib notes. Bush had read this 856 page book masterpiece on one of the key sculptors and enablers of the American nation.

On another news show, unfortunately I can't remember whether it was with Tim Russert or Larry King or some other celebrity news anchor, Bush kept referring to various biographies he had been reading about American presidents and other world leaders. He stated that he had read biographies on virtually all of the American presidents, and on the founding fathers who were involved in the forging of America's political system -- including Franklin and Hamilton -- and then others who did get to the top office like John Adams, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and of course, George Washington.

Bush wanted to stay on the subject of the leaders he had studied and the challenges they had faced when the news anchor, as I recall, kept trying to shift the topic to something less memorable. Bush had read Churchills' works and about Churchill, and Mao, and Adenauer, and de Gaulle.

And while less impressive to me, we know for certain that Bush read and was deeply moved by works by Nathan Sharansky and Bernard Lewis. He invited the famous Yale historian and intellectual giant John Lewis Gaddis to conversations in the White House.

No matter where one may sit on the political spectrum and whether one believes or not that George W. Bush served his nation and our system of checks and balances and civil society well, the notion that he is entirely anti-intellectual and that his only pals were baseball franchise owners and oil men is contrived mystique.

Underneath the fake rough veneer made flamboyantly rougher with his less frequent brush clearing sojourns in the hot August heat in Crawford, Texas -- George W. Bush is an incredibly well read national leader.

To be clear, I don't think Bush's deeds have made the nation safer or more prosperous -- but I go into great detail here to establish a benchmark for knowledge about America's and mankind's great challenges, a point of comparison for anyone who aspires to the highest office in the land.

Bush ranks low on many contemporary rankings comparing the success of presidencies. He has been called anti-intellectual and incurious by many. I don't buy it -- but he serves well as a model that conservatives would be willing to consider as a standard for the presidency.

What has Sarah Palin read?

Could she have managed to stay afloat amongst the nation's leading thinkers and intellectuals and political mavericks and bosses during the Constitutional convention. Would she have followed the issues. Would she have voted for ratification -- for the system of checks and balances so complexly assembled and for which Hamilton, Madison and others so strongly argued for?

This will sound odd, but I think George W. Bush would have done well at the Constitutional convention. He would have been among the more thuggish, cautious lot perhaps -- and if not at the Convention, he might have been pals with Aaron Burr, sort of the Tom DeLay of the day.

Many don't like George W. Bush -- but he would have been a player amongst the powerful in the early days of this country's formation had he lived then.

I don't know whether he would have been a constructive or destructive force when the nation was struggling to put itself together -- but I can see from what I know of the incumbent President now living a mile down from me at 1600 Pennsylvania that he would have understood what was going on.

Bush would have read Plutarch, Cicero and Machiavelli.

But my hunch tells me that Sarah Palin has read few if any of the great books -- or read much on America's greatest leaders, or read about the fragility of process and the passions raging at the Constitutional Convention.

I honestly don't know what she has read. She could issue a list of books she says she has worked through -- but I think that if ABC has another shot at her or if any other journalists get to spend any time on this uncertain gamble for the second highest office in the land that they give her a book test.

Ask her what she has read and quiz her a bit. What leaders in American history does she admire. What can she tell us about the Federalist papers, or about many or any of America's best and not so great presidents? What does she know about womens' suffrage and Susan B. Anthony? or Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass?

I doubt at the moment her experience as a leader appropriate for the nation -- but my assessment of Sarah Palin could be nudged into better territory if I had evidence that she had done some self-teaching about the nation and had devoured books about our leaders, our wars, and our periods of innovation, peace and prosperity.

Matt Damon may want to know if she thinks dinosaurs lived 4,000 years ago as a benchmark for support or opposition.

I want to know more -- I want to know what she knows about America.

-- Steve Clemons

Inspired by occasional TWN reader, George Stephanopoulos. . .

First on the pro-McCain side:

Moonbats dropping like flies from PDS epidemic

It's America's newest disease - only diagnosed by some in the media a few days ago - but it is spreading among the nation's Beautiful People at an alarming rate.

You know it by its initials - PDS. Palin Derangement Syndrome.

You can watch the victims of PDS on TV every night, frothing at the mouth in front of Obama banners, repeating scurrilous lies lifted from left-wing blogs or just making up new whoppers as they go along. It's an epidemic - Palin Derangement Syndrome swept through MSNBC studios this week and claimed two anchors, who are survived by dozens of viewers.

The bad news is, PDS appears to be incurable. The good news is, it only strikes one demographic group - moonbats.

And then a re-charging pro-Obama video, Les Misbarack:

-- Steve Clemons

Update: One regular reader's note has to be added in an update:

An apt metaphor. The next day that namby pamby crew of pie-in-the-sky elitist student idealists was slaughtered on the barricade and was washed away in a river of their own blood.

It's my favorite musical.

-- Steve Clemons

Douglas Holtz-Eakin was introduced to me years ago at a dinner of friends organized by Democrat and economic wunderkind Adam Posen who is a senior staff member at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. I liked him instantly and still do.

I say that hesitantly because too much blog-hugging from TWN can hurt the perceived legitimacy of people on the right and the left that I have supported and endorsed in the past. I once tried to help R. Nicholas Burns out in a possible bid to move up to the vacant Deputy Secretary of State post by doing a hit job on him. Many of my readers excoriated me -- but when I ran into Nick Burns at the British Ambassador's home, he walked up and said, "I knew what you were trying to do -- and thank you." I like the complex thinkers.

But Holtz-Eakin, who is now exploring the flora and fauna of Wasilla, Alaska, was perhaps one of the least partisan directors of the Congressional Budget Office in its history -- though I'd give high marks to the incumbent Peter Orszag as well.

For a very long time -- both before John McCain's campaign melted down in the John Weaver-McCain split and then again when it was resurrected under Rick Davis -- Holtz-Eakin has been the domestic policy adviser to John McCain's campaign.

I know him. He's a straight-shooter, but Joe Klein is trying to tease out a real gap between what the straight-shooting, straight talk express type guy Holtz-Eakin is on fiscal and tax issues and contrast them with the apparently less straight-talking than he used to be John McCain.

Holtz-Eakin apparently told Fortune columnist Matt Miller:

"It's arithmetic." Federal revenue today is 18.8 percent of GDP and federal spending is 20 percent. Holtz-Eakin observes that "the pressure are there" to lift spending [on entitlement programs, mostly] and taxes to 23 or 24 percent of GDP by around 2020, and to as much as 27 percent if health costs remain out of control.

Then, Klein and Mark Halperin's "The Page" contrast this with another statement from Holtz-Eakin:

Asked why Republicans still insist they'll cut taxes, he says, "It's the brand, and you don't dilute the brand."

I am told by someone close to the amiable Holtz-Eakin that one of the odd things about these pair of quotes is that they were most likely made in very different venues, perhaps years apart. (I haven't confirmed this with Matt Miller but the assertion was made by someone close to Holtz-Eakin to me)

I have to admit that I occasionally dig into the work and thinking of campaign staff advisers as well because they are "general" benchmarks to help understand the thinking and direction of a candidate. I think Jason Furrman's work and appointment was an interesting benchmark to understand some aspects of Obama's economic thinking. I think that knowing that Randy Scheunemann is a key adviser to McCain is also essential to understanding McCain's vector on foreign policy.

But they don't explain everything, not by far -- and it may not be completely fair to make the candidate responsible for the views of his staff. They are not the same, not identical.

This reminds me of a story that Henry Kissinger has told on a few occasions -- usually at Nixon Center dinners I have attended.

Kissinger states that when he was serving as Nelson Rockefeller's foreign policy adviser in his campaign in the 1968 race, he was reluctant to join Nixon who had called to have a meeting with him after Rockefeller had been knocked out of the Republican primary by Nixon.

Kissinger apparently called Rockefeller and asked what he should do - hoping to remain loyal to Rockefeller and also cognizant that he and Nixon may not be on exactly the same policy page.

According to Kissinger, Nelson Rockefeller said "Of course go see him. Nixon is taking a hell of a bigger chance on you -- than you are on him."

That's the way it is between advisers and candidates. They are not identical and shouldn't be weighed that way.

But it is interesting to know that Holtz-Eakin is now going to provide some key policy support for Sarah Palin.

Now that gap -- thin or big -- would be fun to know more about.

And also, could someone up with Doug Holtz-Eakin in Wasilla send me a picture of him with a totem pole?

-- Steve Clemons

By John McCain's defense of his own credentials and experience in the Republican presidential debates, one can't help but wonder how he thinks that Sarah Palin would be ready to step into his shoes should something happen to him.

John McCain said during the Republican debates:

I have had a strong and long relationship on national security.

I have been involved in every national crisis that this nation has faced since Beirut.

I understand the issues.

I understand and appreciate the enormity of the challenge we face from radical Islamic extremism.

I am prepared.

I am prepared and need no on-the-job training.

I wasn't a mayor for a short period of time. I wasn't I governor for a short period of time.

Thanks to the new foreign policy blog, Undiplomatic for bringing this to our attention.

-- Steve Clemons

I just read a passage written by Peter Bergen, my colleague at the New America Foundation and a contributor to Anderson Cooper's AC360.

Bergen, who has been the lead chronicler of the iconic Islamic terrorist now joined by my other colleague Steve Coll who recently authored The Bin Ladens, says little new in his commentary on the "long, fruitless hunt for Bin Laden" that he hasn't said before.

He does reflect on the seeming disregard bin Laden has for either his much discussed health problems or America's dogged hunt for him.

What is so strange to me is that Bergen has to keep saying what he has been saying over and over and over again. Bergen's piece, in my view, includes a thread by which to find bin Laden.

He writes:

Seven years after 9/11 the author of the largest mass murder in American history is free, almost certainly living in Pakistan, which is, at least nominally, a close ally in the US-led 'war on terror'. As he no doubt savors the anniversary of his greatest "triumph" Osama bin Laden seems untroubled by serious kidney illness as was once rumored, nor does he appear to be troubled by American efforts to find him.

Since his disappearance at the battle of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan in mid- December 2001 US intelligence agencies have not had any definitive information about the al Qaeda's leader's whereabouts. While there are informed hypotheses that he is in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, on the Afghan border, perhaps in one of the more northerly areas such as Bajaur, these are simply hypotheses not actionable intelligence. In other words, American intelligence agencies have nothing of any substance on bin Laden. Given the hundreds of billions of dollars that the 'war on terror' has consumed the failure to capture or kill al Qaeda's leader has been one of its signal failures.

That said, it is worth bearing in mind that finding any one individual can be hard. Think of Mohamed Aideed, the anti-American Somali warlord who was known to be in Mogadishu, the capital city of Somalia in 1993, yet some 20,000 US soldiers deployed there were not able to find him. Think also of Radovan Karadzic, the alleged Bosnian Serb war criminal arrested in July in Belgrade who it took more than a decade to track down after the end of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, and he was hiding in a relatively small country in Europe, not the badlands of the Afghan-Pakistan border.

And given the fact that bin Laden is not making obvious errors such as talking on phones the signals of which can be intercepted and the fact that no one in his immediate circle will rat him out for the long-advertised cash rewards for his head it is likely that al Qaeda's leader could evade detection for years or even decades.

There are, however, areas where al Qaeda's leader is vulnerable. The most obvious being his continuing penchant for releasing audio- and videotapes. He has released around twenty since 9 /11. Those tapes give strategic guidance to al Qaeda and the wider militant jihadist movement, but they also provide a window of opportunity to find bin Laden as the chain of custody of those tapes eventually leads back to him.

Let me restate that last bit.

Osama bin Laden's chief vulnerability is "his continuing penchant for releasing audio- and videotapes."

Bergen is right -- and to the best of my knowledge, all has not been done to capitalize on the natural vulnerabilities of the media wing of the bin Laden/al Qaeda operation. I'm sure we are trailing al Jazeera types in foreign countries, monitoring their phones, and trying to piece together how bin Laden so regularly ascertains video production capabilities and tapes and distributes these to Arab media. But clearly, we have not been able to apply the intelligence resources needed to penetrate this complex challenge. And we should have been able to years ago with painstaking observation, coding of purchased tapes in the Arab region, and other strategies that might have yielded better results than we have achieved thus far.

Early in the post-9/11 bin Laden chase, I thought he might be possibly lured out by a Unabomber-like appeal to the Saudi terrorist's vanity and the opportunity for him to talk about his objectives.

I believed that an organization -- perhaps a think tank -- in Washington could generate a platform -- and invite the likes of Vice President Richard Cheney, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former President Bill Clinton, perhaps Colin Powell or other luminaries like Jimmy Carter, James Baker, and the like into a top tier discussion about America's role and place in the world. Behind a cloak might be a large screen labeled "Special Guest."

You probably know who that "special guest" could have been.

The think tank or NGO could have tried to work through the various Western and non-Western journalists who had had contact with al Qaeda to offer bin Laden an opportunity to appear "virtually" on stage with the key leadership of a nation he had decided to attack. In this theoretical scenario, the organizer would have told his contacts that they could do all they could do to anonymize and hide bin Laden's digital whereabouts -- and that the organization would not announce his identity until bin Laden was ready to speak.

Both to prevent the organizer from being charged with some crime and because the mission of capturing and/or killing bin Laden was legitimate, the organizer/think tank would have given national intelligence authorities everything they had in the hopes that the nation's defense/intelligence capacity could overwhelm any of the measures al Qaeda was taking to anonymize and hide his live performance.

This never happened -- but I thought a long time about it. I thought it could work.

Much later, I thought that this scenario -- which may sound silly or naive to some -- nonetheless would be great in a high-action sitcom drama or in an intel thriller on the Middle East. But I'm realizing that David Ignatius is filling that role for the moment.

I agree with Peter Bergen that bin Laden himself both matters and doesn't matter. He matters because he has become an iconic figure whose myth grows, like Jesse James' reputation did, the longer he defies the market expectations that he will one day be caught and shut down.

He doesn't matter on another front as his operation, both the direct al Qaeda groups who seem loyal to and depend on him for inspiration and perhaps support and those that self-organize in the Middle East and around the world seem to not need him and his organizational genius to pursue their objectives and generate damage.

Again, my scenario never happened -- but Peter Bergen's notion of exploiting the vulnerabilities of a complex media operation probably require fewer innocents-killing bombing campaigns and more hard thinking, laying of traps, and ingenuity.

-- Steve Clemons

Chris Nelson writes one of the best daily insider political reports in Washington, call The Nelson Report. Don't ask me for it -- it's impossible to get on the web or other ways unless you are a major client or subscriber.

But I have permission to share Nelson's latest on Palin and the important question of how she views religion and God in her policy decision-making calculus:

The Nelson Report -- September 11, 2008

Now, on Palin's coming interview...there's always a chance that ABC's Charles Gibson will have the backbone to be as tough on her as he was on Clinton and Obama, in that infamous primary debate...you remember the one where questions about the American Flag pin were given equal time to policy?

If you will further indulge your Editor for a moment, here's the gist of how we answered the question about faith, public policy and experience, from our Japanese host at lunch yesterday. We suspect that they are on the minds of policy makers throughout Asia and the world, given the shot-in-the-arm Palin has given the McCain Campaign.

Palin's views may well be "just a heart-beat away" from setting the agenda as "leader of the free world".

First, on religion, we don't worry about her particular doctrinal beliefs, necessarily, although we'd like to hear about the Rapture, speaking in tongues as proof of God's favor, and the like, these things being beyond our personal ken.

What the public has a right to know is to what political use, if any, Palin's beliefs may be put.

That is a legitimate question for Palin, more than most politicians, because she says she bases her personal and political philosophy on her Christian faith, and is on record saying she seeks divine guidance...and receives it...on public policy matters.

So there can be no such thing as "privacy" when it comes to exploring the nexus between her personal faith and her public performance...because that's apparently not a distinction she makes.

With respect, we argued that history shows all too clearly that leaders who think they are operating with a direct line to God's policy recommendations have a track record written in blood. Unchallenged, they represent a huge risk to their own country and to others.

Of course we are NOT saying it's unsafe to pray for Divine Guidance...but speaking personally, we'd be a hell of a lot happier if one kept it to asking for the strength and wisdom to make the right decision.

Abraham Lincoln's model comes to mind, should you seek Republican guidance.

It's asking God for the details that strikes us as dangerous, likely delusional, and from the religious point of view, quite possibly blasphemous.

The reason is simple: if you think you are in direct communication with God on matters of public policy, then anything which pops into your head, ipso facto, you may consider to be the Word of God.

If you are sensible (and we are lucky) you may not, of course...that's where "judgment" comes in...but that's also where the "experience" factor can become critical.

If the question under prayerful contemplation is something on which you have little or no personal experience weighing, arguing, and listening to competing points of view, then how can you parse the difference between divine inspiration and nonsense?

Picture George Bush listening to Condi Rice on many occasions, to see what we mean.

If you've never thought much about it before, if you've not been listening...for years...to permutations and combinations of the historical and policy factors involved, then with all due respect, your "judgment", on your very best day, is likely just a guess.

Now factor-in personality: if you cleave toward an authoritarian style, how do you treat competing judgments, and arguments? If you are operating on a direct line to God, and you think you have received God's wisdom, how do you respond to those who disagree?

Are they fellow citizens with a constitutionally protected point of view...or sinners requiring punishment? Listening to McCain and Palin talk about "Washington elites" you have to think their definition of "sinner" is elastic beyond the heavenly norm....but that may be special pleading, please Lord forgive us.

It just seems to us, we argued to the JCAW audience, that from what we've seen and heard so far, Palin is asking the American people to take too much on faith, when a politician tells us that he or she operates on the basis of it.

Anyhow, perhaps she will answer truthfully and thoughtfully...if our faith in Charles Gibson as a real journalist is rewarded tonight. Part 2 of the ABC TV interview will be aired Friday night.

-- Steve Clemons

Neither the U.S. or Russia should appease each other's worst behaviors -- but threatening war with cataclysmic potential with the world's only other arrmed-to-the-teeth nuclear heavyweight ought to be accompanied by more than a "perhaps so" when queried about a possible direct armed conflict with Russia.

If this race were between Joe Biden vs. John McCain, the choice for me would be very easy. But we are being forced because of the optics of this situation and the Palin sizzle and spin to compare Obama and Sarah Palin.

Obama has been studying foreign policy issues regularly over the last couple of years in the Senate -- but there is little doubt that his experience is limited.

But hers is even moreso.

To be clear, I would drop any support I held of Biden and Obama in a nanosecond if they responded like Sarah Palin did in the interview with Charles Gibson tonight.

War with Russia -- no matter its behavior -- requires more than a casual comment about a direct hot conflict betweent the world's two most heavily armed states.

The fact that Palin seems not to want to admit or is not aware of is that no matter our bluster, Georgia's irresponsibility in this encounter will delay both Ukraine's and Georgia's NATO entry.

Here is a clip from the Associated Press about the Palin interview tonight:

When Palin was asked during the interview whether the United States would have to go to war with Russia if it invaded Georgia, and the country was part of NATO, Palin, who has been criticized by Democrats for what they say is her lack of experience especially in foreign affairs, said: "Perhaps so."

"I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help," she said in the interview with ABC News.

"What I think is that smaller democratic countries that are invaded by a larger power is something for us to be vigilant against ... We have got to show the support, in this case, for Georgia," Palin said, when pressed on the subject.

-- Steve Clemons

It's clear that Matt Damon agrees with former Senator (and former Republican) Lincoln Chafee who said this about Palin:

I do think she is dangerous for the future of the country having such limited experience and sharing that aggressive, belligerent approach to the world.

That's not in our long term best interests. It's a dangerous planet -- nuclear weapons -- a tremendous capacity of destruction exists.

It's going to take some wisdom and ability to see gray sometimes, and lessons of the Cold War are that sometimes containment can work.

New generations come along, the Gorbachevs come along -- and we haven't fired missiles at each other and killed each other.

That's the lesson of the Cold War we seem to have ignored, Lessons that worked.

-- Steve Clemons

Lt. General and former National Security Agency Director William Odom once wrote this about the Iraq War:

The invasion of Iraq may well turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in American history. In any event, the longer we stay, the worse it will be. Until that is understood, we will make no progress with our allies or in devising a promising alternative strategy.

Odom's funeral service was held Monday at Arlington National Cemetery. I considered General Odom a friend -- and he was a frequent reader of this blog.

Dan Froomkin has memorialized this important commentator on war, power and peace in an annotated bibliography of William Odom's commentaries.

-- Steve Clemons

Lincoln Chafee was one of my favorite moderates in the U.S. Senate. His common sense progressive realism in foreign affairs was essential during the battle over John Bolton's confirmation. Unlike a number of others who sought higher national office, Chafee voted against the Iraq War Resolution.

I think that now that he has become a political Independent and quit the Republican Party (he told me that he has always voted Republican in every race until 2008 though he said that he wrote in George H.W. Bush in the 2004 presidential race), Chafee is well-positioned to serve in an Obama cabinet or to run as an Independent for the governorship of Rhode Island. I would support him on both fronts.

However, Chafee added a bit of color to his profile yesterday and in a very lucid, lay it all out there talk at the New America Foundation about how he was let down substantively and politically by Bush/Cheney, he expressed some strong views about Sarah Palin.

On the front page of Roll Call's "Heard on the Hill" column, Emily Heil and Elizabeth Brotherton write:

He Said What? Former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee is know for being a friendly, mild-mannered guy. But the Republican-turned-Independent's good nature isn't because he lacks the tough-talk ammo, as he proved Tuesday while promoting his latest book, "Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President," at the New America Foundation.

Chafee (a supporter of Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama) was discussing how GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's speech at the recent Republican National Convention energized the party's base. While he said it was impressive, Chafee thinks the Alaska governor also energized the left, as Democrats were outraged "to see this cocky whacko up there."

Chafee's comment drew gasps from the audience, who apparently were not expecting to hear such relatively feisty language from the normally genteel former Senator. It even shocked event moderator Steve Clemons, who responded, "Did you just say 'cocky whacko'?"

Chafee just smiled.

Chafee's comments on Palin appear at about 53:00 in this video clip. I also do a shorter clip of six minutes here in which Chafee says of Palin, "she is dangerous for the future of the country" -- and explains why.

-- Steve Clemons

Former Senator Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) is now a political Independent and helped spearhead with former Bush 2000 campaign New York co-chair Rita Hauser and former Congressman Jim Leach "Republicans for Obama."

I think that there is a very good chance that Chafee could end up as a senior member of an Obama administration -- or even more interestingly, he may be preparing himself for a bid as an Independent to run for the governorship of Rhode Island.

I spent a few minutes with him yesterday talking about the current policy and political terrain as well as his recently released book, Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President.

A more full version of Lincoln Chafee's talk at the New America Foundation yesterday titled "What Patriotism Looks LIke" can be viewed here. His comments about Sarah Palin in the Q&A were 'colorful'. (the Palin comments come about 53:08. He calls Sarah Palin a "cocky whacko.")

But in the interview above, Chafee said this about Sarah Palin:

I do think she is dangerous for the future of the country having such limited experience and sharing that aggressive, belligerent approach to the world.

That's not in our long term best interests. It's a dangerous planet -- nuclear weapons -- a
tremendous capacity of destruction exists.

It's going to take some wisdom and ability to see gray sometimes, and lessons of the Cold War are that sometimes containment can work.

New generations come along, the Gorbachevs come along -- and we haven't fired missiles at each other and killed each other.

That's the lesson of the Cold War we seem to have ignored, Lessons that worked.

Chapter 13 -- the chapter of Chafee's book -- on the John Bolton battle in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is my favorite.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

Before I write much today, I just have to say that I agree with Joe Klein and Margaret Talev in crying foul about the distortions in a recent McCain ad about Obama and sex education.

I'm not going to spend more time on that because the John McCain I know as well as the Rick Davis, Trevor Potter, Mark Salter, and others who have stood with McCain for years are honorable people. This ad was a mistake -- and they probably know it. I have no evidence for this, but my hunch is that this ad went out without thoughtful screening from above.

If they did approve it, then they should reconsider it.

But on other fronts, I've been talking to various women who either support Obama or Hillary Clinton. I've had a tough time finding women who support John McCain -- but clealry Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman and others do. But many of the HIllary women remain apologetically enthusiastic about Sarah Palin.

Some women who are Obama supporters -- and one of whom is a Pulitzer prize writing authors -- are telling me that they are doing what they can to convince other women that Obama will be good for their interests.

But in an email I received from one of these yesterday: she asked me "where are the heads?"

What this means is that she doesn't see Obama-supporting talking heads, particularly of the female gender, out in field meeting with folks.

I spoke to a senior Obama campaign official yesterday who told me that they are doing all the can to rev up their female base and to get people out talking -- but that he knows it still feels like a less than adequate footprint.

I don't think women are moving en masse to McCain/Palin -- but the fizzle of enthusiasm for Obama/Biden is wanting.

Hillary Clinton is the key -- and probably always has been. It's too late to put Hillary on the ticket -- but I wonder if Obama is willing to make his first tough-minded political act his support of Hillary Clinton as Senate Majority Leader.

It would cost him as Harry Reid doesn't want to be deposed and Richard Durbin and Chuck Schumer want the job -- and she's not a formal part of Senate leadership as of now.

But extraordinary challenges require extraordinary fixes and gestures.

-- Steve Clemons

Tomorrow, Tuesday, at 12:15 pm, I will be chairing a meeting at the New America Foundation with former Senator Lincoln Chafee (R-RI).

Chafee, who is now a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Watson Center for International Studies at Brown University, is now a political independent and author of the book, Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President.

Chafee helped launch Republicans for Obama along with philanthropist and former Bush 2000 campaign New York co-chair Rita Hauser and former Congressman Jim Leach. Chafee was also an indispensable partner, from a distance, in the battle to prevent John Bolton from receiving the confirmation of the US Senate as US Ambassador to the United Nations.

Bolton is still weighing in on international affairs and confirming every day why his brand of pugnacious nationalism is detrimental to American interests at the U.N.

The meeting will STREAM LIVE here at The Washington Note at 12:15 pm EST -- and I will be sure to ask him about his reflections on patriotism in this time of swirling and severe political passions.

I will also ask him how given his background as a horse farrier, he became such an excellent, realist-tilting foreign policy expert. Lessons learned might be valuable given some of our political choices ahead.

-- Steve Clemons

I have no independent verification, but MSNBC is out with a news alert stating that "U.S. official tells AP that North Korea's Kim Jong Il may have suffered stroke."

The U.S. botched the transition (thus far) of Fidel Castro stepping down from power. If indeed Kim Jong Il has had a stroke and their is leadership uncertainty in the country, now is the time to ratchet down tensions, offer support and assistance -- not to kick them while they are down.

North Korea is a nation held together with a leadership and control structure tied tightly around Kim Jong Il. Transferring authority to another -- a relative or another powerful player in the country -- is going to be dicey if his stroke is debilitating.

-- Steve Clemons

(Laura Bush: Librarian and Teacher)

I sometimes don't understand the media. Why don't they ask the right follow up questions?

Although banning and burning books worked for Emperor Qin and a few other colorful figures in human history, Sarah Palin and the McCain camp are denying that she tried to get any books banned from the Wasilla Public Library.

Denials are tricky things -- but let's for a moment accept Sarah Palin at her word.

The natural question is then on what grounds did she pursue the firing of the local village librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons.

Is firing the local librarian a normal thing in small towns? After Laura Bush herself has helped resurrect the honor and dignity of librarians nationwide, is it not an odd un-Bush like thing to do to enrage a town by trying to dump someone who checks books in and out and promotes literacy?

Why? Why? Why? Why did Sarah Palin try to fire the Wasilla librarian? That is the question that anyone with the chance to pose a question to Sarah Palin should ask.

Maybe Laura Bush can email her for us?

-- Steve Clemons

When I wrote this piece about Sarah Palin which was published here at TWN and also Huffington Post the other night, a good number of progressive readers really wanted to have my head. I had about 400 emails -- a good 80% of which were screaming at me for what I saw as Sarah Palin beating expectations. Many said I was blind or deaf -- and one said I was working covertly for the GOP. (I'm not working for either party for the record.)

Now we've had a few days to see that in fact Sarah Palin has revved up a lot of Republicans. She has also animated a lot on the left who fear her, and Barack Obama's coffers are filling up fast with donations in response to the McCain/Palin ticket.

But among many progressive political junkies, of whom I consider myself one, a real depression has set in.

They see poll numbers showing a significant bounce for McCain -- with one poll showing him 10 points ahead. CNN has McCain ahead by two and the Washington Post has McCain and Obama in a dead heat. But most other polls show McCain ahead at this point -- and that is making a lot of pundits, writers, and activists hyperventilate.

Guardian US editor Michael Tomasky wrote a note to me and a few others today encouraging folks to calm down. I quote him with permission:

Let's calm down a little. Let's not live and die by the last poll or the last thing that Candy Crowley said. This will be decided by 1) debates 2) field and 3) ads, in that order.

Tomasky is wise. There is a long way to go in the race. I remember when John Kerry and Michael Dukakis were considerably ahead at this point in their races, and they were still defeated. The same fate could befall McCain.

But this site seems to do a better job than any others I have seen of not getting seduced into the laziness of national polls. It uses state polls to sort out what might happen in the electoral college.

FiveThirtyEight.com notes that there is new polling in five key swing states and after sorting it out, the analyst notes that McCain has made some modest inroads but that Obama still wins if the election was held tomorrow. 298 to 240 electoral votes.

But still that's incredibly close. Not much has really changed about how divided America is even after eight years of Bush/Cheney.

-- Steve Clemons

Good ad actually -- and although it's pre-Palin, I liked it and think it should go up.

My problem is that I think the world needs a Dean Acheson today, not a Churchill.

-- Steve Clemons

-- Steve Clemons