I've been tossing around an idea here at the New America Foundation for a couple weeks, much to the entertainment of my coworkers. I think it's worthy of consideration, though: the resurgence of pirates.

This is not, for the record, simply a Halloween post in disguise, though I am considering Sparrow like attire for the weekend.

The LA Times has a piece this morning with an excellent lead: "Straddling a wooden crate filled with $1 million in cash ransom, a cranky old pirate bellows names from a notebook as his anxious, bleary-eyed minions lean against the stone walls of their cramped hideout."

The story, of course, is from Somalia, the current piracy capital of the world. Some 16,000 ships navigate through the Gulf of Aden each year, with more and more of them coming under attack. The AP reported Thursday that six ships had fended off attacks over the previous two days and that a seventh had been captured. More than 77 ships have been attacked this year in the Gulf, at least 31 one of them falling to captors. Ransoms paid out in 2008 are reported to have topped $30 million.

The business of piracy has become so common that in Hobyo, a village 300 miles north of Mogadishu, all but four of the towns 80 fishing boats are now dedicated to piracy. The infusion of capital into Eyl, the coastal town where captured ships are most often taken, has been so great that a cup of tea, which previously cost only a few cents, is up to roughly a dollar. Prostitutes in Djibouti have reported making $1,000 to $3,000 in a single night.

My thesis, however, is not about Somalia, but rather about the likelihood of replication. I think this is likely a new generation of asymmetrical, economic warfare. The world has become too interconnected for piracy to remain isolated to the Gulf of Aden. Occasional acts of piracy have already been linked to Yemeni vessels, and global news coverage - exacerbated last month by the capture of a ship hauling 33 tanks - assures that knowledge of the effectiveness of the tactic will not remain unique to the horn of Africa.

Global Shipping Routes

I think famines fueled by climate change, along with water shortages towards the midcentury years, are likely to decrease the powers of poor central governments, most dangerously in African coastal states. Major shipping routes across the Maghreb and along the western African coast will be subject to the highest risks. Also, the Straits of Malacca -- which has been historically troubled by pirates -- and other routes through the South China Sea, will be at heightened risk if weak governments are incapable of adjusting to the challenges of the twenty-first century.

Piracy is cheap, efficient and rewarding, and is likely to become a widely employed tactic unless deterred by host governments. Deterring piracy with naval force is difficult. A recent Chatham House report -- which is the most thorough investigation I've seen -- suggests time between spotting pirates and being overtaken is typically about fifteen minutes. Employing several small, fast, maneuverable boats make evasive measures difficult for large, slow shipping vessels. Even waters heavily patrolled by naval forces -- Chatham's paper states there are 12-15 patrolling naval ships in the Gulf of Aden -- are bedeviled by the model.

Pirates armed to the teeth and equipped with GPS, Satellite phones, and motherships for refueling, could be a major challenge to global commerce in the coming decade.

Beware of Sparrow's revenge, and happy Halloween.

-- Brian Till

The New America Foundation's Sherle Schwenninger and industrialist and philanthropist Bernard Schwartz were out way ahead of the pack in calling for massive government commitment to infrastructure investment.

Now this has become conventional wisdom of late. Not too long ago, Senior Obama economic policy adviser Austan Goolsbee complimented Schwenninger's heavy-lifting on the infrastructure agenda before many others were in that policy space.

But beyond a bland embrace of the need for new infrastructure investment, I really appreciated Barack Obama's thoughtful dissection and embrace of the infrastructure challenge in his exchange with Rachel Maddow last night.

He's exactly on target.

From the Maddow-Obama interview:

MADDOW: There may be some policy fights ahead, particularly in responding to the economic crisis that will have both a practical and an ideological component. If we are looking at economic stimulus, is there a possibility that you could see in your first term, if you are elected, that we'd need an economic stimulus program that felt to Americans a little bit like a public works program, a little bit like an FDR-style infrastructure building program?

OBAMA: Well, I've actually talked about this. And I haven't been hiding the ball on this. I think we have to rebuild our infrastructure. Look at what China's doing right now. Their trains are faster than us, their ports are better than us. They are preparing for a very competitive 21st century economy and we're not.

One of the most frustrating things over the last eight years has been the ability of George Bush to pile up debt and huge deficits and not have anything to show for it, right? So, if you're going to run deficit spending, then it better be in rebuilding our roads, our bridges, our sewer lines, our water system, laying broadband lines.

One of, I think, the most important infrastructure projects that we need is a whole new electricity grid. Because if we're going to be serious about renewable energy, I want to be able to get wind power from North Dakota to population centers, like Chicago. And we're going to have to have a smart grid if we want to use plug-in hybrids then we want to be able to have ordinary consumers sell back the electricity that's generated from those car batteries, back into the grid. That can create 5 million new jobs, just in new energy.

But, it's huge projects that generally speaking, you're not going to have private enterprise would want to take all those risks. And we're going to have to be involved in that process.

MADDOW: Also an issue on something like the electrical grid, that's an issue of American resilience, even against the threat of terrorism. A lot of times when you look at counter-terrorism, officials think that they came out, or an al-Qaeda attack on the electrical grid.

OBAMA: That's exactly right.

MADDOW: Well you know, at this point, a snow storm is an attack on our electrical grid.

OBAMA: That's exactly right.

MADDOW: Are there Homeland Security vulnerabilities that you think are fixable in ways that would also be good for the economy?

OBAMA: Well, you mentioned one. The electricity grid I think is important. I think that chemical plant security is another where the chemical industry has been resistant to mandates when it comes to hardening their sites. But, you know what? If you've got a chemical plant that threatens 100,000, or a million people in New Jersey, we better have some say in terms of how serious they are about guarding that facility.

MADDOW: Why hasn't that been fixed already?

OBAMA: Well, I think it's a classic example of special interests lobbying. There has been resistance from the chemical industry. And it is this -- again, an ideological predisposition that says regulation's always bad. So, stay out of the market place.

Well, look. I am a strong believer in the free market. I am a strong believer in capitalism. But, I am also a strong believer that there are certain common goods that you know -- our air, our water, making sure that people are safe -- that require us to have some regulation. Now, it has to be well designed.

But, the financial system is a classic example of a deregulation philosophy run amuck. And now, you see the consequences and ironically, had we had some sensible regulation, we would not have now, actually, a much closer approximation to socialism when it comes to the banking system, then anything that any Democrats have been proposing over the last several years.

When you don't guard against excess, then a lot of times government ends up having to step in anyway, in a much more burdensome way.

MADDOW: Part of the ideological argument against regulation is that
government always does things (INAUDIBLE).

OBAMA: Yes.

MADDOW: I've been worried about this because I've been very focused on the GI bill.

OBAMA: Right.

MADDOW: VA is making worrying noises about their ability, their capacity to implement it. Can you give me an example of how you would make agencies better at doing what they're supposed to do? Just improving capacity?

OBAMA: Well, look. Look, look. I mean, there's a great example in FEMA. Now, they've gotten better since Katrina. But, the idea that our basic emergency functions had been under the leadership of a guy whose only expertise was you know, the Arabian Horses Association. That's a problem.

So, some of it's just getting the right people. Some of it is using technology in intelligent ways. One of the things that I'm excited about is to transfer what we've learned from this campaign in using technology, into government. I mean, there are huge areas where we can open things up, make things more transparent.

I passed a bill working with a Republican, Tom Coburn, called the Google for Government Bill, where now you can go to a single site and you can pull up a searchable database of every dollar of Federal spending that's out there. Which means now you've got a lot greater accountability.

While there are examples of that all throughout our government that can remove bureaucracy, eliminate red tape, make the whole process more customer friendly. Anybody's who's gone to the post office and wants to buy some stamps and you're trying to figure out the machine, it's not working properly, the lines are long.

There's no reason why we can't make operations like that more efficient and work better. They do it in the private sector all the time.

Barack Obama really impressed me with this policy discussion -- as did Rachel Maddow, as usual.

-- Steve Clemons

A couple of well-placed insiders have told me that US Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad is going to make a quick split after the November 4th election. Some think he is going to position himself to run for the presidency of Afghanistan -- which I sincerely hope he does not do. Others think he has lined up a financially lucrative perch at an investment house. The problem with the latter scenario is that I was informed by my sources of Khalizad's departure agenda before the financial meltdown.

Khalilzad has been an effective and important successor to John Bolton at the UN on a number of levels, but one aspect of his service and identity that rarely gets attention is that he is the highest-ranking Muslim in the Bush administration.

America needs Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans in positions of responsibility in our government -- and not just dealing with Arab-American and Muslim issues. This is important as America needs to keep open the doors of civic opportunity to all Americans however hyphenated.

Yesterday, Justin Vogt of The New Yorker wrote a piece titled "Imagined Community" for the new Abu-Dhabi based The National. His article is one of the most serious and comprehensive discussions of the state of Arab-Americans in American politics I have read. I had a few quotes in the piece including the comment that "Both Muslims and Arab-Americans have been ill-treated in this political environment."

But the reason to read it is that we do need the 'likely' Obama administration to immediately suspend its generalized phobia of most things Muslim and Arab. McCain and Palin have been trying to slander Obama for relationships with "questionable" Arabs and have through a variety of means allowing a whisper campaign that he may be "Muslim."

I agree with Colin Powell. Why should it matter?! Muslims and Arab Americans are no less American than anyone else reading this blog -- or reading RedState.org or listening to Fox and Friends in the morning.

Although, shame on Tom Ridge for jumping on the bandwagon of hysterical demonization and slander of Columbia University Rashid Khalidi and Barack Obama even though Ridge said on Fox's show Tuesday morning that he knew nothing about Khalidi or what he had written or said -- but that this showed Obama's tendency to associate himself with terrorists and questionable people. That was outrageous.

Some of these Fox critics ought to dig into the founding entities of the Likud party in Israel and apply some historical objectivity.

-- Steve Clemons

Obama appointment rumors are spinning like crazy in DC. Very, very hard to tell what is real and what is self-initiated advocacy and perch-mongering from those who think they will help run Obama Land.

The most interesting thing I've heard -- and regret (though I hope he changes his mind or takes over at Health and Human Services) -- is that Tom Daschle may be taking himself out of the running as chief of staff in Barack Obama's White House. Many around Obama think that he needs a cunning, tough, even mean chief of staff and Daschle doesn't fit that mold. He knows it -- but in my view, he's the single best guy to help massage and manage the many egos that are going to need to be sculpted to achieve success. Daschle can also reach across the aisle -- and despite the upswing in seats in the House and Senate -- I think Obama needs someone like Daschle helping to run his shop.

I learned this news a couple of days ago -- and heard that Rahm Emanuel wants the job. Now there is news that he's been approached about it -- which is the biggest sign that Daschle is off that list. Others under consideration are John Podesta and interestingly, former Commerce Secretary Bill Daley.

Rahm Emanuel will give Obama the tough edge he may thinks he needs at his door -- but I think that Daschle, who helped Obama perhaps more than any other person by giving the young Illinois senator the keys to the Daschle political franchise, or Center for American Progress president John Podesta or even Daley would soften the impact on allies of the tough decisions coming that will make a few big winners and leave scores and scores of losers (who thought they would be winners).

Emanuel is interesting -- but the first thought that came to mind when I saw word today that Obama had approached him on the role was "Dick Cheney." Cheney was a Member of the House of Representatives. . .and a Chief of Staff. And both Cheney and Emanuel are addicted to power.

Will Rahm Emanuel help Obama create a more transparent and accountable White House -- or will he propogate secrecy? Will Rahm Emanuel work to disown and give back many of the usurped powers that the White House tried to secure for itself at the expense of the legislature and judiciary -- or will he try to maintain many of the monarchial instruments Bush and Cheney put in place?

I don't know the answer actually. I hope Rahm will realize that he's going to have to see a roll back of White House power for Obama to succeed in the eyes of those who support him and sent him to the world's top job. We'll see.

But on other fronts, I'm off to Yale University tonight. Tomorrow, thanks to Yale University scholars Daniel Esty and Bruce Ackerman, I'm giving a couple of talks -- one to the university chapter of the American Constitution Society. Then, I'm hanging out with folks engaged in a large scale Model UN exercise....and finishing four, yep four, writing projects by tomorrow. (Yes we can. . .)

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

Wow. Palin 'essentially' implies that she'll be back to challenge for the presidency in 2012, leaving a McCain aide "speechless."

Why speechless? Well, the battle for 2008 isn't exactly over.

ABC has the transcript out.

-- Steve Clemons

I thought that the idea of a 30 minute infomercial on Barack Obama's approach to policy and life had more downside than upside.

I think I was right overall -- but Obama's performance and the package as a whole hit the target -- and despite the risk -- they will get more upside from this.

For those who missed it or who want a replay, the video has been posted on YouTube just moments ago.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a surprisingly moving and interesting video featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Snoop Dogg, Harrison Ford, Julia Roberts, Ben Stiller, Will Smith, Steven Spielberg, Justin Timberlake, along with Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat, Zach Braff, Colin Farrell, Neil Patrick Harris, Scarlett Johansson, Shia LeBeouf, Tobey Maguire, Ryan Reynolds, and Jason Segal.

Most of you who read this blog probably don't need encouragement to vote -- but send this to those on the fence who don't quite get how consequential this election is.

-- Steve Clemons

Sunday's strike of a compound in Syria by American Special Forces, purported to have killed important Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) smuggler Abu Ghadiya will have broad strategic consequences for America and the Middle East as a whole.

In a fascinating article, The New Republic yesterday described how Sunday''s strike is part of a wider effort from the White House, which has recently given US Central Command jurisdiction to conduct attacks on the sovereign territory of other countries, ranging from Pakistan and Syria to Somalia, Yemen, and even potentially Iran.

The reasons for this move are unclear. Historian and Iraq expert Juan Cole, who consistently offers some of the best insight into Iraq and the Middle East, believes the strike was designed to warn Syria against sheltering Al Qaeda elements. Somewhat more cynically, he also suggests that it could be meant to influence the upcoming Presidential elections, by keeping Al Qaeda from staging attacks in Iraq before next week.

I snapped this picture on Monday morning this week in Bartlesville, Oklahoma where I paid $2.09 a gallon for gas.

Bartlesville is the original home base of Frank Phillips and Phillips 66 (now ConocoPhillips).

This ought to worry everyone. We'll be under $2.00 in some parts of the country soon -- and the price gougers elswhere in the country will slowly float down to these levels as well.

This is unfortunate on a number of fronts as a combination of the massive economic shocks that have hit the country and the precipitous price drop at the gas pump will be negative incentives in moving more expeditiously to alternative energy regimes.

-- Steve Clemons

When I find myself nodding in agreement with about 75% of what Jorge Mas Santos, the Chairman of the Cuban American National Foundation, is saying in a critique of George W. Bush's wrong-headed US-Cuba policy, I know the world is changing and sense that South Florida politics may be undergoing a sea change.

I don't agree with Mas' views on regime change in Cuba, but this essay blasts John McCain for status quo-ism and embraces Obama's "flexibility" in thinking through how to turn away from failed policies.

And Sarah Stephens, Director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas, has an outstanding piece out today on the human costs of the anachronistic, failed, but painful embargo which most of the world strongly criticizes.

Here is a piece of her Huffington Post essay:

UN Members are now digesting a report compiled by the Secretary-General that measures the impact of our sanctions in chilling detail.

The embargo hurts Cuba's health care system. Last year, it forced Cuban children with heart conditions to wait for needed operations because a US-based firm, Boston Scientific, has refused - as it must, under U.S. law - to sell needed devices to Cuba's William Soler Pediatric Hospital. It prevented the purchase of spare parts for diagnostic equipment used in cancer detection, and delayed the delivery of 3 million syringes for vaccinations against communicable diseases. It forced Cuban medical authorities to buy antiretroviral drugs from secondary suppliers in grey markets, at significantly higher prices - straining an already thin public health budget.

The embargo also takes food off the table in Cuban homes, by blocking the government's access to imported seeds, fertilizers, and spare parts for farm machinery, and by imposing exotic payment rules that add tens of millions of dollars to its bill for importing food from overseas.

In other words, the sanctions we aim at Cuba's government actually hit and hurt the health and diet of the Cuban people instead.

But the embargo is more than a bilateral matter between Cuba's government and ours. US law reaches companies and countries across the globe in an effort to bend their policy to our will, rallying the rest of the world to Cuba's side

Brazil calls our policy a violation of international law. Mexico condemns the embargo as an abandonment of diplomacy. Colombia, our closest ally in the region, says of the US embargo "this kind of action should stop." The European Union, now negotiating directly with Cuba on human rights, objects to the extra-territorial reach of our sanctions. China calls on us to negotiate our differences directly with Cuba. Russia - without a trace of irony - refers to the embargo as "a remnant of the cold war."

It is no wonder that last year's sanctions vote went against America 184-4. Only Israel, Palau, and the Marshall Islands stood with us. Every one of our European allies, Canada, Japan and Australia, and nearly all of Latin America (save El Salvador, which was absent) deserted us. It will happen again this year. Already, close to one-hundred fifty countries filed statements with the Secretary General for this year's debate that bear witness to our isolation.

The funny thing about Israel voting with us on the embargo is that Israeli interests are managing citrus groves in Cuba.

-- Steve Clemons

I have just spent the last 30 minutes kicking around these new country page profiles on Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and Morocco.

Shadi Hamid of the Project on Middle East Democracy has assembled these portals, which I think are quite good.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

Tonight. . .7:15 pm EST. . .(which is Wednesday morning Sydney time), I'll be talking with the best morning radio talk show host in Sydney, Australia -- Deborah Cameron. I do this every Tuesday night DC time.

The show streams here.

Next week, wearing my tux I'll be weighing in on Cameron's show from the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center.

-- Steve Clemons

I'm in Oklahoma today -- returning to D.C. on Monday.

I paid $2.11 a gallon for gas in Bartlesville in fact. It was $2.36 in Centreville, Maryland on Saturday -- and $2.94 in D.C.

I just received this extensive profile by the New Yorker's Connie Bruck on Senator Chuck Hagel.

I haven't read it yet -- but you bet I will in the morning. But TWN readers in Japan and Australia can get a head start on me -- and the many insomniacs who read this blog.

Congrats to all those who raced in today's Marine Corps Marathon in Washington.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

John McCain is said to be extremely "eaten up" that he allowed party advisers to push him to appeal to the base of the Republican Party and choose Sarah Palin over his preferred choice, Joseph Lieberman.

But that would not have helped him in the worst decision of his campaign -- to abandon realist principles in foreign policy -- and embrace the kind of neoconservative thinking that had already had a tragic run in the Bush administration.

Edward Luce of the Financial Times gets at this in a piece on McCain's temperament and the divide he's aggravated inside Republican circles. Even my former boss at the Nixon Center, Dimitri Simes, joins the chorus:

Then there are the "realist" Republicans who worry that Mr McCain has been captured by neoconservative advisers, such as Randy Schuenemann, his chief foreign policy guru, who has helped shape the candidate's relatively hardline stance on Russia, Iran and other issues.

This has combined with Mr McCain's tendency to view foreign policy as a kind of "morality play" in which there are people who oppose America and people who do not, they say. Foreign policy was a key reason why Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, chose to endorse Mr Obama on Sunday.

"I don't know of anybody, anywhere other than John McCain who thinks Mikheil Saakashvili is a 'great leader' of Georgia - it is an absurd evaluation," said Dimitri Simes, head of the Nixon Centre in Washington. "John tends to see the world emotionally through characters he knows. And once he has decided who the good guys are and the bad guys are, then facts and context won't affect him."

Few, if any, of these doubts are in evidence at the boisterous McCain-Palin rallies, which are filled with Republicans who also disdain Washington and who respond well to Mr McCain's rallying cry: "Stand up! Stand up! And fight for America!"

Completing Oliver Holmes's dictum - that FDR had a "second-class intellect" - Mr Buckley said: "Obama not only has a first-class temperament but he also has a first-class intellect. There is no doubt that John is very bright but you know Obama writes his own books. John gets his books written for him [by Mark Salter, his closest aide]."

Detractors accuse Mr McCain of dividing America. But the most acute cultural divide his campaign is exposing is within the Republican party itself.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

It just gets more and more weird. I wonder if Senator McCain just threw his shoe at the window exclaiming "is there anything else that can go wrong?!"

-- Steve Clemons

I can't validate this and probably won't try for the time being. But I will report a reasonably high quality rumor that reached me from a high quality source.

The rumor is that McClatchy News is trying to report a story that should Barack Obama win the election, most of the key members of his Cabinet will be announced on Friday, November 7th.

And the two most likely candidates for the job of Secretary of State, according to the rumblings are. . . . .Senator John Kerry and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson.

I'm not sure where this leaves Richard Holbrooke, Senator Chuck Hagel, Senator Richard Lugar, former Senator Sam Nunn and others with sights on that job. I like Senator Kerry and think he brings some real strengths -- but Hagel would bring nuance, no "false choices", energy and some legs on the political right. Richard Holbrooke would also be someone of progressive, cut-throat skill in the job -- and would be someone I'd want around twisting arms and delivering results. Richard Lugar is the hard core favorite of a lot of foreign policy veterans.

If it really is John Kerry or Bill Richardson and not a head fake -- Obama has to choose Kerry.

I won't go further than that for the time being into the relative strengths and weaknesses of the contenders, but I did want to share that this news story, which could just be fluff, is reaching some very high placed media stars.

If folks know more, fill me in -- and send me your tips.

-- Steve Clemons

(Josh Tulkin with Scott Paul outside a yurt near Tash Rabat, Kyrgyzstan. Photo Credit: Zoe Chafe)

Josh Tulkin is a very close friend. He has dedicated his life to speaking for future generations and vulnerable populations threatened by climate change. He works tirelessly to make U.S. policies more responsive to folks who can't stand up for themselves and reflective of our most treasured national values. As far as I'm concerned, any definition of "patriot" that excludes Josh -- and other devoted "community organizers" -- necessarily loses any real meaning (and I'm sure when he reads this statement he'll be as touched by its sincerity as he will be amused by its grandiosity).

Last night, Josh told me that the state of Maryland thought he was a terrorist. I was tired. He was out in a loud public place. I woke up thinking I must have gotten some part of the conversation wrong. Not so: today, I found a copy of a letter from the Maryland State Police (MSP) to Josh confirming that he, along with a number of other Maryland activists, was improperly surveilled and under suspicion of domestic terrorism by MSP under Gov. Ehrlich from March 2005 to May 2006.

Here's Josh:

It goes without saying that Josh and the other "suspects," many of whom worked on anti-death penalty and peace initiatives, should be allowed to view their files with their attorneys present. Fortunately, the Maryland ACLU has taken up that battle.

This issue is bigger than Josh or the other wrongly surveilled individuals in Maryland. It's part of an ongoing assault on civil rights, hand in hand with unchecked expansion of executive power. Sound familiar?

Andy Revkin at NYT has lots of good links on this. I'll update if I get anything interesting from Josh.

-- Scott Paul

I spent a bit more than 40 minutes this morning with Pedro Pedro Echavarria on C-Span's Washington Journal

You can watch the entire clip at your convenience on line by clicking here.

The discussion focuses on the differences and similarities between John McCain's and Barack Obama's foreign policy views.

-- Steve Clemons

I caught this snippet tonight of an Australian political/policy blogger, Gary Sauer-Thompson, who was not so taken with the substance of an interview that Sky News Australia did with me -- but rather that Sky News was taking bloggers and blogging seriously.

I agree with the writer that this is a good thing.

I then scrolled down this blogger's "blog roll" and institution links and saw that OzProspect is still under way under the leadership of Tim Watts, who years ago was a research associate at the New America Foundation.

Down under, I also regularly read The Interpreter, which is associated with the Australia-based, Asia Pacific-focused Lowy Institute for International Policy. Their blogger is world class.

Another great blog out of Sydney is Bruce Wolpe's White House '08 blog at the Sydney Morning Herald.

And almost lastly, the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue, a very solid operation that has brought a diverse set of senior level of Australians and Americans together for years, provided the foundation for this exchange between Vice President Cheney and myself that made news on quite a number of blogs after being reported in the New York Times. An even better version that includes color from Bruce Wolpe and former Liberal Party Minister of Finance Peter Costello can be read in Barton Gellman's new book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.

And to wrap this up about bloggers, media, and international politics, I have the privilege each Wednesday morning (Australia time) to chat with ABC 702 radio anchor Deborah Cameron in Sydney about American politics. She and her team are terrific and also take blogs seriously.

So I'm with Gary Sauer-Thompson who got me thinking about this, but from my own perspective -- just as a lone operator far away from Australia -- I think his great country is getting with the trend.

-- Steve Clemons

Tomorrow morning, Thursday, I will be on C-Span's Washington Journal starting at 8 am EST discussing the foreign policy views of John McCain and Barack Obama.

Here are the texts of major speeches the candidates gave today.

John McCain in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Barack Obama in Richmond, Virginia.

See you tomorrow morning.

-- Steve Clemons

The GOP has spent $150,000 on spiffing up Sarah Palin and her husband.

Way to reach "Joe the Plumber". . . obviously.

-- Steve Clemons

THIS EVENT CAN BE WATCHED ON LINE AT THIS LINK.

Tonight at Washington's National Cathedral, I will be helping to introduce a major event -- attended by more than 1,200 people -- titled "America and the World: Picking Up the Pieces."

The program will start at 7 pm and conclude at 9 pm EST. This is the inaugural event of a newly endowed "Nancy and Paul Ignatius Program" established by Washington Post national security columnist David Ignatius and his siblings and family friends.

The event will stream live on the National Cathedral website (and perhaps at TWN -- but not sure yet). A video file will also be available for later viewing.

This event will start with opening comments from Washington National Cathedral Dean SAM LLOYD and New America Foundation/American Strategy Program Director STEVE CLEMONS.

Then, DAVID IGNATIUS, ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, and BRENT SCOWCROFT will engage in a discussion about US foreign policy building on their recently released book, America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy.

Then, HAILI CAO of Caijing Magazine in China, Bishop of Batswana TREVOR MWAMBA, Carnegie Endowment Iran expert Karim Sadjadpour, and New York Times foreign affairs columnist THOMAS FRIEDMAN will offer comments.

I think that the book is must read -- and look forward to getting the video of this interesting event to the readers here at TWN

-- Steve Clemons

This morning, a friend of mine, Marwan Kreidie, has a passionate and smart oped in the Philadelphia Inquirer that challenges the slur that John McCain indirectly embraced when an elder woman at a McCain rally said "I don't trust Obama. . .He's an Arab."

While McCain said that Obama was a good and honest man, those terms seemed to be juxtaposed against being an Arab.

Kreidie writes:

At a campaign stop in Virginia this month, a supporter told John McCain, "I don't trust Obama. . . . He's an Arab."

The Republican candidate took the microphone away from her. "No, ma'am," he said. "He's a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with."

Say it ain't so, John. Well-meaning as you may have been to Barack Obama, can you condone using Arab as a demeaning label? The exchange suggested that all Arabs should be regarded as toxic, kind of like those mortgage-backed securities threatening to topple global financial markets.

Well, I am an Arab - "you betcha" - and darn proud of it. Arab Americans descend from a people who helped civilize the world. Arabs not only made our own important contributions, from algebra to sorbet; we also preserved ancient wisdom in universities while Western civilization's Dark Ages threatened to extinguish any connection with its classical roots.

Who are Arabs? People who are native speakers of Arabic, hailing from the 22 countries that today constitute the Arab League - mostly in the Middle East and North Africa - and their descendants. Arabs are mostly Muslims, but they can be Christians. An Arab can be a blond-haired, blue-eyed, bikini-clad woman on a beach in Beirut, or a black woman wearing a traditional hijab (head covering) in southern Egypt.

Arabs started immigrating to the United States in the mid-19th century, and today, more than three million Americans can trace their heritage to the Arab world. Among them: Dr. Michael DeBakey, the famed cardiologist; Danny Thomas, the entertainer who founded the preeminent pediatric cancer research hospital, St. Jude Children's; Doug Flutie, the storied quarterback; Cabinet secretaries Donna Shalala and Spencer Abraham; and Gen. John Philip Abizaid, who led the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), overseeing American military operations in a 27-country region, from 2003 to 2007.

Colin Powell reached out on on Sunday to Muslims in his powerful and moving endorsement of Barack Obama -- and I'm pleased to see that other national leaders are beginning to roll back the bigotry that was becoming accepted even in liberal circles about both Muslims and Arabs.

At least in one case I know of personally, a leading national Arab American Republican activist in Washington wrote a check to Barack Obama after the McCain encounter with the "Obama's an Arab" lady above.

For those who have the time, it's worthwhile visiting the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. It's fascinating to see the long roster of prominent Arab Americans profiled there.

One of these Arab Americans is former New Hampshire Governor and George H.W. Bush chief of staff John H. Sununu. I ran into Sununu last week at both a reception at the Embassy of Saudi Arabia and then at the annual dinner of the American Task Force on Palestine.

Sununu told me that when he ran for Governor in New Hampshire twenty-five years ago, everyone told him that he'd never win in the conservative state with a name like "SUNUNU". Then when his son, John E. Sununu, ran for and won a Senate seat in New Hampshire, the pundits said it was because of his name "SUNUNU."

Another interesting point is that Jeanne Shaheen who looks as if she is going to take that seat from the Sununu clan is married to one of the power players in New Hampshire's well-networked clan of Lebanese-Americans Bill Shaheen.

I have traveled with Bill and Jeanne Shaheen to the Middle East along with Arab American Institute President James Zogby -- and I'm pleased to know that there will continue to be a Senator from New Hampshire who will stand against the increasingly worrisome trend of embedded racism and bigotry against Muslims and Arabs in a lot of our national discourse.

Bottom line. Kreidie is right. Americans need to stop tolerating bigotry against Arabs full stop.

-- Steve Clemons

Just saw this. Apparently, Schmidt is going to hit the trail for Obama despite his company's relationship with the McCain campaign and a host of other Republican campaigns across the country. According to a well-placed source, the McCain folks are absolutely livid. Since Google's pretty much the game in Internet search, it's highly unlikely they'll pull ads or substantially redirect ad money over some hurt feelings -- but my guess is they'd like to very badly.

-- Scott Paul

Oakley, Annie, and Buddy send their best.

-- Steve Clemons

-- Steve Clemons

Powell's statement on the young American Muslim killed in Iraq is incredibly powerful and poignant.

Like me, Powell agrees that this embedded racism and bigotry against Muslims who are American and Muslims abroad has to be reversed. I look forward to the day when we have Muslims on the Supreme Court, in the Senate and White House. I look forward to the day when we have Asians, gay people, Latinos, Inuits, and the like as Americans aspiring to occupy the highest offices in the land.

Powell put this out there in a big way. It's long overdue.

-- Steve Clemons

(This article appears today at Tina Brown's "The Daily Beast." Here is the actual link to my piece.)

This morning, about a nanosecond after Colin Powell gave his endorsement of Barack Obama for President, I called his long-time aide and former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson. The brusque former Army colonel told me he had no idea which way Powell might tilt but that he was "utterly ecstatic" with Powell's decision.

And he said that like Victor Lazslo said to Rick after all of the drama in "Casa Blanca", which happens to be Colin Powell's favorite film, he felt like saying "Welcome back to the fight, Colin."

Since exactly three years ago today -- October 19, 2005 -- the day Wilkerson cleared his conscience and offered a full-throated condemnation of the Bush administration and "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal," the American public has been waiting to see if one of America's greatest contemporary generals would follow in his aide's footsteps and be able to distinguish between loyalty to the President he had served and loyalty to the people and Constitution of the United States. Wilkerson's friendship with Powell suffered a massive blow as some thought Wilkerson was presuming to speak for Powell, which he wasn't -- but on many levels -- Wilkerson and other dissident Republicans frustrated with the nation's foreign policy course helped legitimate an exodus away from the GOP and towards Obama. Powell has now joined them.

Colin Powell -- probably the only man who could have run against and beaten George W. Bush in 2000 -- probably sees a lot of himself in Barack Obama. Clearly, they are both African-Americans and committed to breaking through every last racial barrier in the U.S. But Powell would have supported Obama had he been Caucasian, Latino, or Vietnamese-American. The value that Obama brings to politics is that he transcends convenient typecasting. Colin Powell kept breaking the mold as well as he rose to prominence and almost the White House -- held back by his wife Alma who feared scenarios of assassination as well as his own sense that he didn't have "the fire in the belly" for elective office.

Powell said of Barack today that "he has both style and substance. I think he is a transformational figure." W's first Secretary of State also didn't like the defamatory slurs deployed by the McCain/Palin team trying to link Obama to William Ayers' anarchist views. And Powell doesn't think Alaskan caribou-gutting expert and folk legend Sarah Palin is qualified to be President of the United States.

Powell's endorsement breaks some family china. His son, former Federal Communications Chairman Michael Powell has been an advisor on technology to McCain. And his best friend and potential defense secretary choice in a McCain White House, Richard Armitage, is still listed -- despite Bill Kristol's best efforts to export anyone connected to Powell out of Republican circles -- as a key national security advisor to McCain. Lawrence Wilkerson has been with Barack Obama from just about day one of the Illinois senator's race.

John McCain has frequently referred to Colin Powell as one of the greatest national servants he has known -- and vice versa. The break with McCain today is about the General's firm belief that America is at a pivot point in its history. John and Cindy McCain love Abba. That may sound modern in a Pierce Brosnan kind of way.

But Powell, 71 years old, was in London last week dancing some hip hop and singing some rap with Nigerian group Olu Maintain. Seriously though, Powell works hard for young, underprivileged youth and launched "America's Promise" to help motivate and animate young people who get little support from others. That's what really is driving Colin Powell's endorsement.

Much of the political left doesn't think it wants Powell's endorsement. They are still angry at him for helping the Bush administration promulgate lies and half-truths at the UN General Assembly meeting designed to shore up support for America's misguided invasion of Iraq. Americans loved Powell's honor and dignity, fairness -- but that day cost him a lot in the eyes of much of the country and world.

But Powell fought torture. He said that Guantanamo should be immediately shuttered and the detainees brought into America's existing judicial system. In the Israel/Palestine standoff, he said we should engage Hamas -- something neither McCain or Obama have had the resolve to admit needs to be done. Powell has been insisting that we should be dealing with the world as it is -- not as we may imagine it to be.

How could he tell the next young group of students he meets through his own organization or when he speaks at mega-forum motivational seminar -- or visits with kids in the classes Larry Wilkerson teaches in inner city DC each week -- that Sarah Palin is what they should try and become. No way.

Powell wants the world to be better, to stand for better things -- and that is not the world cynically sculpted by Karl Rove, Bill Kristol and McCain's current team.

From the iconic general's vantage point, genuine hope and change is what Obama stands for -- and we should applaud Colin Powell for coming back into the fight.

-- Steve Clemons

This morning on Meet the Press, Colin Powell endosed Barack Obama for President of the United States.

Take that, Bill Kristol. . .

-- Steve Clemons

Obama has raised a breathtaking $150 million over the last month. Incredible.

But Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, who reported the take said enough isn't enough.

According to CNN:

In a video to supporters, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said a record 632,000 new donors gave to the campaign, with the average contribution under $100. More than 3 million donors have given so far.

The Obama campaign raised $65 million in August.

Regardless of the stunning haul, Plouffe told supporters the campaign still needed more money because "of the slime that we're getting from the McCain campaign." Plouffe cited recent attack ads and robo calls in battleground states and said the campaign needed to have every resource to "fight back."

"Their campaign is going to descend even more into the gutter," he said.

Plouffe also said the campaign was expanding its reach to compete "aggressively" in West Virginia.

The country is hurting. Lots of people are going to see their incomes and financial situation take a hit.

Obama is doing an incredible job in this campaign and fundraising at historical levels.

However, I'm uncomfortable with statements that sound like a ravenous campaign beast can't stop itself from wanting more, more. . .and more.

-- Steve Clemons

More and more conservatives -- real conservatives -- are abandoning John McCain. They respect his service to the nation. They revere him for his patriotism, his POW past, his willingness to break with party leaders to do what the country really needed at key moments.

But the anger about McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate is substantial.

There is evidence of this all around -- but lately, former AEI scholar and conservative attorney Allan Gerson's interesting piece on why Jeanne Kirkpatrick probably would have supported Barack Obama adds to the chorus.

But something that is very off color and that I should discreetly report is what one of the most well-known conservative commentators in the world said to me privately in Chicago. I won't report the name of the individual, but he/she said:

What are we to think of McCain's choice of Palin? It's outrageous -- an insult to the nation and an insult to everything the man has supposedly stood for all his life.

McCain's decision is right up there in the history books -- right up there with Caligula appointing his horse to the Senate.

No self-respecting conservative can support McCain now.

I want to make clear that I do not agree with this commentator. Sarah Palin is Governor of Alaska. There are actually far, far less qualified people that John McCain could have picked to run with him. Joe the Plumber comes to mind.

But I offer this comment from a well-known conservative personality as a benchmark of the anger out there in Bush Land about John McCain.

-- Steve Clemons

This is very cool. Thanks to the blogger who did it.

-- Steve Clemons

(photo credit: Steven Clemons)

I am participating in an excellent two day forum in Chicago organized by the Global Business Policy Council of A.T. Kearney. On Thursday, A.T. Kearney, Foreign Policy magazine, and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs will be releasing an interesting new study titled "The 2008 Global Cities Index" that I'll be commenting on later.

But as part of the time here, we had dinner at the Art Institute of Chicago -- in what was the rebuilt floor of the old Chicago Stock Exchange.

Financial Times chief economics commentator Martin Wolf and I did a wandering tour together of the Institute's European collection -- and found ourselves both overwhelmed by this Rembrandt, Old Man with a Gold Chain.

But about the photo above. I took it.

This is Dianne Feinstein speaking at a dinner at Restaurant Nora organized by my New America Foundation colleague and blogger friend Jeffrey Lewis (aka Arms Control Wonk) on nuclear strategy and non-proliferation. To the left of Senator Feinstein is Morton Halperin, and in the foreground Arnold Kanter.

While I don't consider this great art, it seemed art-tilting -- and just wanted to share it.

-- Steve Clemons

This morning, long term Colin Powell aide and former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson sent me a note seeming to downgrade the chance that General Powell might endorse Barack Obama (or John McCain).

Wilkerson wrote:

Steve:

By the way, this is how I see tomorrow's TV appearance.

I see CLP making comments about the financial situation, about the national security and foreign policy issues of the day, and, most importantly, about the need not to return to 1968 (RFK and MLK, Jr. were assassinated, as you'll recall) and to remain calm and appeal to the better angels of our nature -- and not be saying things like "Kill him" or "He's a terrorist" about the candidates.

But no endorsement. The endorsement part is being played up so the maximum amount of people will watch what he believes is the greater message about tolerance, etc...

lw

If Powell offered such a message to the nation -- particularly given his wife Alma's concern about Powell's possible assassination had he run for President in 2000 -- then that message to the country would be more important in many ways than an endorsement.

Interestingly though, David Corn uses other commentary from Wilkerson to argue that a Powell endorsement at this point in the campaign is reaching a higher degree of probability.

I'm sticking with what I wrote yesterday: Powell "might" endorse someone, but I just don't know. I hope he does, and if he endorses Obama -- then McCain has something else to blame Bill Kristol for.

-- Steve Clemons

Politico's Mike Allen and others think that Colin Powell "may" endorse Barack Obama this weekend on Meet the Press.

Note the word "may." I agree with Mike Allen that Powell may take this action -- or may endorse John McCain.

I queried General Powell on his intentions and on another matter. He responded to me on the other matter that I can't discuss and stayed mum on the primary reason for my note.

I responded back to ask him if he might make sure to include me in the first tranche of those he lets know about his intentions. His response: "Thanks Steve."

So, I have no idea what General Powell might do with regard to his Meet the Press appearance on Sunday -- but I know that he's pondering something big. Otherwise, he would have discounted the news of his potential endorsement.

Interestingly, I think Colin Powell has maintained a very dignified stance between the Obama and McCain camps -- meeting with both sides and offering both his counsel.

And then a weird thing: Bill Kristol, in my view, tried to "export" Powell to the Obama camp saying that Powell would not only endorse Obama but would probably speak at the Democratic National Convention. In my opinion, Kristol was trying to purge the realists from the McCain camp -- particularly Powell protege and long term aide, Richard Armitage.

Kristol did not succeed in pushing Powell out -- and General Powell did not speak at the Denver convention of the Democratic Party -- but like Mike Allen lays out, General Powell may be on the verge of announcing his own conscientious choice, made under his own steam weighing the merits of the two campaigns and expressing what he feels the nation needs now.

I am very much looking forward to Colin Powell's thoughtful assessment of America's national security and economic portfolios and our leadership choices Sunday morning.

-- Steve Clemons

I just taped a fun yet serious segment with Rachel Maddow a few moments ago on McCain's Sarah Palin-like failure to vet "Joe the Plumber".

It should be on her show on the Air America network tonight.

--- Steve Clemons

My colleague Nir Rosen, who is also a contributor to The Washington Note, is quickly becoming the preeminent Robert Kaplan-esque chronicler of Islamist insurgencies and conflict.

Rosen's latest piece, "How We Lost the War We Won: A Journey Into Taliban-Controlled Afghanistan" appears in Rolling Stone.

Here is the intro from this fascinating article:

The highway that leads south out of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, passes through a craggy range of arid, sand-colored mountains with sharp, stony peaks. Poplar trees and green fields line the road. Nomadic Kuchi women draped in colorful scarves tend to camels as small boys herd sheep. The hillsides are dotted with cemeteries: rough-hewn tombstones tilting at haphazard angles, multicolored flags flying above them.

There is nothing to indicate that the terrain we are about to enter is one of the world's deadliest war zones. On the outskirts of the capital we are stopped at a routine checkpoint manned by the Afghan National Army. The wary soldiers single me out, suspicious of my foreign accent. My companions, two Afghan men named Shafiq and Ibrahim, convince the soldiers that I am only a journalist.

Ibrahim, a thin man with a wispy beard tapered beneath his chin, comes across like an Afghan version of Bob Marley, easygoing and quick to smile. He jokes with the soldiers in Dari, the Farsi dialect spoken throughout Afghanistan, assuring them that everything is OK.

As we drive away, Ibrahim laughs. The soldiers, he explains, thought I was a suicide bomber. Ibrahim did not bother to tell them that he and Shafiq are midlevel Taliban commanders, escorting me deep into Ghazni, a province largely controlled by the spreading insurgency that now dominates much of the country.

Until recently, Ghazni, like much of central Afghanistan, was considered reasonably safe. But now the province, located 100 miles south of the capital, has fallen to the Taliban. Foreigners who venture to Ghazni often wind up kidnapped or killed. In defiance of the central government, the Taliban governor in the province issues separate ID cards and passports for the Taliban regime, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Farmers increasingly turn to the Taliban, not the American-backed authorities, for adjudication of land disputes.

-- Steve Clemons

Watch CBS Videos Online

Seems to me, Joe the Plumber (aka, Samuel "Joe" Wurzelbacher) wants to be a Fox News host more than being a plumber anyway.

Turns out the guy does not have a license to be a plumber. Well, you know. . .more government regulation. . .can't have that! Wait, is McCain for regulation and licensing - or against it? I keep getting confused.

And to give Barack Obama his due, Plumber Joe does not have income more than $250,000 and thus would not be subject to any tax increase under Obama's plan. Joe just doesn't like taxes and thinks taxes on the rich are a "slippery slope" to taxes on everyone else.

Here's the video clip (above). . .be sure to catch the end when he says Obama tap dances a lot "like Sammy Davis Jr."

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

There is one book that explains the Bush presidency just about better than any other I have read -- and it hardly deals with Bush. It focuses on Vice President Cheney's all-but-in-name presidency.

Barton Gellman's Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency deserves another Pulitzer on top of the one that Gellman and co-author Jo Becker already won in 2008 for their riveting four part series on Cheney, his team, and their surprisingly large impact on the nation's economic and national security positions.

I reviewed the book for this month's American Conservative magazine. The entire essay is linked here but here is an excerpt for others:

The curious way in which Cheney maneuvered himself onto Bush's ticket is one of many disturbing stories in this new and brilliantly researched account of Cheney's adventures as Bush's "No. 2." Barton Gellman, Pulitzer-winning Washington Post journalist, examines the nuts and bolts of Cheney's power apparatus. He shows how a mere vice president engineered a massive expansion of presidential power, knocked back the constitutional authority of Congress and the judiciary, helped launch an illegitimate war, developed a system for spying on America's citizens, oversaw White House-sanctioned torture, and pushed official secrecy to unprecedented levels. We see how Cheney punctured America's mystique as a benign and respected nation--how he shattered the moral, economic, and military pillars of American power.

Gellman had access to a surprising number of Cheney's close aides and others in the Bush White House. He records previously unknown anecdotes about the inner workings of the administration and Cheney's take-no-prisoners approach to winning policy battles. While Bush and members of his inner circle like Karl Rove seemed to be obsessed with the political machinations of their work, Cheney had a deeper purpose behind his crusades. For him politics and political gamesmanship, seduction, and intimidation were all about changing the nation's policy course--all about principle. Cheney wasn't much interested in weather politics. When Bush ordered him to survey Hurricane Katrina's damage, he reluctantly complied. But his heart and soul were invested in the most important and controversial aspects of the Bush presidency, the policy areas he cared about most--terrorism, intelligence, national security, energy, environmental policy, tax and budget issues.

Gellman makes the fascinating and convincing claim that Cheney's notorious secret meetings with energy lobbyists, which prompted legal complaints from various NGO's, Congress, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office, were never about anything important. Cheney and his abrasive lawyer David Addington wanted to bring on governmental crises and tensions with Congress in order to demonstrate the dominance and infallibility of presidential power, which they defined as the "unitary executive." In Gellman's framing, Cheney saw 9/11, discussions with energy lobbyists, and even torture policy as mere vehicles for asserting his vision of a near monarchial presidency.

Angler leads its readers to think that, even without 9/11, Cheney would have found triggers to justify his imperial expansion of presidential powers and official secrecy, his pugnacious disregard for international law, the huge defense spending increases, the war against Iraq--or whatever nation would show that America was an irresistible force--and the massive tax cuts. Gellman argues that Cheney was never an apostle of neoconservatism. He didn't have a burning desire to establish democracy in Iraq. For Cheney, John Bolton, Addington, and others, Iraq was but a means to an end--a tool to expand presidential prerogatives. The same does not necessarily apply to Scooter Libby, a leading neoconservative thinker who strongly favored the invasion for ideological reasons.

This book is simply one of the scariest stories ever written about contemporary America. Cheney and Addington essentially hijacked the bureaucracy of national security and put themselves in the cockpit of government. In chapter after chapter, we read how Cheney set about constructing a secretive system of government and policymaking in which he was accountable to almost no one. We see, for instance, how Cheney pushed through the second round of tax cuts--a move that made even Bush uncomfortable--and how he undermined Christine Todd Whitman, then administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, over laws regarding air quality.

In contrast to the protagonist and his agents, there are heroes. John Bellinger, a senior lawyer on the National Security Council and then at the State Department under Condoleezza Rice, fought for the interests of Congress and international law. For that, he was beleaguered by Addington and frozen out of the conspiracy to create the legal rationalization for the domestic electronic eavesdropping program. He has nonetheless stayed in the game for the last seven years, trying to bring about a return to Geneva-like standards and end the administration's extralegal detainee policies.

[For more, read here.]

Bravo to Joe Biden who during his debate with Sarah Palin said how it was with Cheney. Biden called him "one of the most dangerous vice presidents in America's history."

Gellman's book tells you why. It's a must read.

-- Steve Clemons

I saw a graphic like this recently -- in which it showed all of the world except the U.S. in a "gray color" labeled "Supports Obama."

And then the continental U.S., Alaska and Hawaii were labeled "undecided."

Here is a new take at IftheWorldCouldVote.com on how Obama is more enthusiastically embraced globally than by John McCain.

A more serious effort measuring global attitudes about McCain and Obama was actually part of a release done some time ago by the Pew Global Attitudes Survey and Bruce Stokes.

-- Steve Clemons

I'm in Barack Obama's home base town, Chicago, and will live blog this debate. I'm sitting here with Martin Walker, editor emeritus of UPI and Director of AT Kearney's Global Business Policy Council, as well as his wife, Julia Watson, who publishes the blog, Eat Washington.

Bob Schieffer -- whose brother Tom is George W. Bush's Ambassador to Japan -- opens with a question about the beleaguered economy and why each candidate thinks his particular economic plan is better than his rivals.

McCain has started off with a salute to Nancy Reagan who is in the hospital with a broken pelvis after a fall. But then he gets into why Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were the core root of the housing crisis. Not really true -- and I don't think he spoke in a way where his lines were memorable. But mostly, he didn't say why his plan is better than Obama's. . .

Barack is up. Good line...."we are in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression." That will be remembered. He said he tried to work for "core principles. . ." And he said we haven't seen a "rescue package for the middle class."

Obama has a lot of memorable phrasing. He's been working at this. McCain was wonky, serious, calm -- but not memorable.

Another good line. . .Obama doesn't want to engineer "a giveaway for banks."

This is by far the best start I have seen for Barack Obama.

McCain is trying to talk directly to a small business plumber named Joe Wurzelbacher who thinks Obama's plan will raise taxes on him. Interesting maneuver.

Obama gave a very effective response speaking to a much wider group around "Joe the plumber." McCain says Obama is trying to redistribute Joe the Plumber's money to other people. Obama counters that he's going to lower taxes -- or not raise taxes -- on 95% of the nation's citizens.

McCain is coming off as crotchety, snarky. . .but he did a good job connecting to an individual's personal economic problem. . .Joe the Plumber.

Kind of like pointing up into the gallery at the President's State of the Union address. . .seems personal, but basically insincere.

Home ownership is teed up by McCain. McCain thinks if we can start "increasing home values" we can help get beyond this problem. How is he going to actually increase home values.

McCain is losing it. . .sounds angry....bubbling that we need to change this, change that -- but it's not articulately or cleanly constructed. He's running down a technical roster of "to do's" but it is not organized.

Touche. Obama said that "earmarks" -- a centerpiece of the McCain campaign -- constitute 1/2 of 1% of spending. Ouch. That was a good line. . .and then Obama went into the macro issues of how large the surplus was seven years ago and how large the deficit is today.

McCain: "Senator McCain. . .I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago. . ." It's getting more tense.

McCain just told Bob Schieffer that he thought he could balance the budget in four years. McCain said "yes" -- he could do it. I say, no way. . .

Obama is defending himself against McCain's charges that he's not stood up against the leaders in his own party. Obama raised charter schools, clean coal technology and tort reform -- none of which are popular with Dem leadership.

Obama just scored by linking McCain to Bush and saying that he's essential a continuation of eight more years of the Bush administration. Now McCain defends himself. . .

I don't like his answers but McCain is getting more solid and clear as this moves on.

Ooh...the William Ayers question just came up indirectly. Schieffer asked whether they'd say to each other, face to face, what their campaigns have essentially been accusing each other of. . .

McCain just accused Barack Obama of spending more money on negative ads than any other presidential candidate in history. Also called him untruthful for flip-flopping on a commitment made early in the campaign to take public funding rather than private for his campaign.

Obama is doing a nice job saying that we need to talk about the economy, health care, energy, sending people to college -- rather than the tit-for-tat politics as usual game going on. McCain is attacking Obama for running ads that distort McCain's record on stem cell research, his health care plan, and immigration. . .

McCain is hitting hard -- and according to the "males" in uncommitted Ohio voters that CNN is tracking, is scoring some support.

Obama is getting less smooth as McCain pushes harder -- and he's losing momentum. Obama is getting know response on the CNN monitor. . .but this is just a short blip in an otherwise strong performance thus far by Obama.

But clearly McCain succeeded in pushing Obama off balance here -- at least for this section.

McCain's campaign just sent me this graphic depicting amounts spent on negative ads by the Obama and McCain campaigns:

McCain now saying he doesn't care about an old, washed up terrorist -- Bill Ayers -- but he thinks Americans should have the right to know about the extent of Obama's relationship with Ayers, with Acorn, and with other people and institutions who have threatened or do threaten the integrity and stability of America's democracy.

Obama said look at who I do associate with -- Jim Jones, Warren Buffett, Richard Lugar, Joe Biden. Ayers is not a part of Obama's campaign or advisory group -- but Obama said that McCain has made Bill Ayers a central part of his campaign. . .

After a poor start, I have to say that McCain is putting in a strong performance. He's coming off as serious, direct, confrontive. He's putting Obama off his game just a bit. . .

McCain is defending Palin -- calling her a reformer, a breath of fresh air, an anti-crony type. . .and oh yes, she understands "special needs" children. What really bothers me about this line is that it took her to have a child with special needs to be into the subject to the degree that she is. What if her child turns out to be gay -- will she find herself able to move beyond tolerance of homosexuals??

Obama previously did a good job of speaking to Joe Biden's solid credentials. McCain just called the Biden/Gelb federal plan for Iraq a "cockemany plan". But essentially, McCain said that Biden could be qualified to be president. . .grudging respect of a sort.

But McCain is staying tense, tough, direct, confrontive.

Now McCain is saying that Obama doesn't support nuclear power. I know that's not true. We'll have to see how Obama responds. . .but I've heard Obama talk about expanding "safe nuclear" power.

Obama says that in "ten years", we can significantly reduce external American dependence on oil. Obama is for some offshore drilling, but drilling will not help Americans move beyond foreign oil dependence. He then said that he's supportive of wind, biofuels, geothermal, solar, etc. . .but actually he did not say nuclear.

Here is a response from an undecided observer who sends insights to TWN now and then:

Steve,

Seems to me that not only has John McCain come out swinging but that many of his jabs are landing. In part because of clearer statements and accusations but just as much because Obama is (surprisingly) accepting the premise of the argument and justifying it with a (poor) response.

I fear Obama is trying so hard not to make a gaf or lose his notoriously cool demeanor that he is allowing too much to go unchallenged. I think in some of these situations, just once in a while, "Joe six pack" and "Sally hockey mom" might actually like to see a little steam come out of his ears now and then.

(PS - who would have imagined Bob Schieffer would be the best of all the moderators and the one actually holding the candidates' feet to the fire on actually answering the questions asked? Lastly, please point out the voters should feel pandered to and angered by promises of energy independence. I would expect more from the otherwise sound policy wonks in the Obama camp.)

Ugh. I don't like this. The Columbia Free Trade Agreement that has not been passed by
Congress is not the best agreement to debate principles of trade. McCain has thrashed Democratic opposition to the agreement -- and Obama who acknowledged that the Columbia FTA has provisions supportive of environmental and labor standards said that Columbia labor leaders were sometimes subjected to assassination attempts -- and the government was not moving against perpetrators.

Obama talking about how to reindustrialize the "heartland." Actually a very good response and a decent shout out to the auto industry.

Now on to health care. . .Obama is talking first to those with health care and telling those folks that he's going to try and lower their costs. And to those without health care, he's going to try to negotiate with health companies on drug prices and stop denials of service -- and then offer a plan to everyone that's a lot like what Members of Congress have.

McCain said we need to reduce costs by putting health records on line. Those who fear Big Brother won't like that. . .but his response sounds a lot like Obama's advice to fill up tires with air to deal with the high prices of oil and the energy crisis (i.e., not good).

Joe the plumber is back!!! McCain shouts out to him -- calls him McCain's friend -- and said that if Joe doesn't get a health care plan then Obama's plan is going to "fine him."

Now Obama says hi to the virtual "Joe the Plumber." Obama responds to McCain that Joe will not pay any fine regarding health insurance. . .in fact Joe will get a credit of 50% for all of the health care he provides people who work for his plumbing company.

I think "Joe the Plumber" is the unanticipated drinking line for those expecting to down beers every time "maverick" came up. . .which it hasn't.

Women in Ohio don't seem to be happy whenever Joe the Plumber's name comes up -- but there will be a lot of articles next week on "Joe" -- all over the nation and world. And Joe apparently tilts McCain's direction.

John McCain wants "Joe to do the job." He wants Joe the Plumber to stand against the increasing size, scale and operations of government.

I wish Obama had someone to talk to like Tania the Teacher or Wally the Warehouse Guy. . .or someone. . .

Wow. John McCain thinks Roe vs. Wade is a bad decision but he would submit "no litmus test" of any kind to Supreme Court nominees. interesting. . .John McCain is going to win points here. McCain just told the public he voted for Justice Breyer and Justice Ginsburg.

Obama is coming off weak in response. He's not jumping at this. He calls the situation of picking judges consequential. He thinks Roe vs. Wade does stand in the balance. He thinks "good people on both sides disagree on this." Generally a weak response. He seems to not understand that this is a zinger issue that he should be hitting out of the park.

I think Obama is trying to avoid gaffes. I am getting a lot of email from sophisticated political watchers and supporters of Obama and they think he's holding back on purpose. I'm not sure. He started out smooth.

McCain is smooth and tough now. Doing a strong job -- but I can't tell if he's really convincing independents to move his way.

Again, Obama is on the defense explaining his old votes on partial birth abortion. He's getting too technical and is not impressing the audience.

McCain is succeeding in nudging Obama off his game, at least to some degree. Obama is still coming off as presidential, as someone with gravitas and stature, but just a little bit weak. . .had to say it. It's true.

John McCain was doing so well -- but then he looks like the naughty little child right now that has to speak and sputter what is on his mind immediately. I think he lost a few points on the behavior front.

Now. . .last question on education. America spends more on education than any other nation in the world -- but we trail the world in educational performance. First to Obama -- the education problem has more to do with the future of the nation and the security of the nation than any other issue. Obama said that the debate is between either "more money" or "reform" -- and he said we need "both."

I hate to say it -- but I'm not an education policy specialist -- but every time I hear a leading politician talking about hiring more teachers, training them, setting standards. . .it ALWAYS sounds the same to me. And now Obama is saying we need "parents" in the game too. Same old. Same old. . .to me. I know that ed policy people may disagree.

McCain says that education is the civil rights issue of our times. He wants competion between schools -- wants to promote good teachers and "find bad teachers another line of work." McCain said that "throwing money at the problem is not the solution. . ."

John McCain just made the odd comment (at least to my ears) that American servicemen who come back and who can teach ought not to be subject to testing exams. Is this the guy who was just promoting standards and encouraging benchmarking between good and bad teachers?

Obama is pro charter schools like McCain. He wants greater emphasis on childhood education. Obama disagrees with McCain on widespread distribution of vouchers -- and went after McCain for calling youth who needed greater support to go to college "an interest group." Obama said that students are not an "interest group" -- they are "our future."

McCain was very strong in the middle of the debate -- but his eye rolls and huffpuffery at the end cost him stature and probably the debate. He reinforced he's angry -- but also reinforced that he was knowledgeable and compelling.

Obama is steady, a bit aloof, smart -- here at the end. McCain, at the end, was snarky but still strong through a great deal of the debate.

Now for closing spin from both. McCain said "America needs a new direction and that he wants to take on special interests. . ." He might try and take on his own national security advisor who was working for the Government of Georgia in the lead up to a high stakes global conflict. I'm not anti-lobbyist, but I think McCain just comes off silly pretending to be as anti-vested interests as Obama when so many of the vested interest crowd populate his campaign.

Obama, in his closing statement, reminds people of what an economic mess the nation is in. He said "we need fundamental change in the country." He says we are going to have to reinvest in the country, in the middle class, in education, in health care. He's doing a good, positive job of calling on the nation to join him in managing very tough challenges -- and did a nice job of saying that if he got the "extraordinary privilege" of going to the White House, he'd work tirelessly on behalf of Americans.

Very nice end for Obama. But taking all of it together -- I think that this was a "tie."

Obama was not a definitive win and occasionally came off bland and flat -- but he had moments of excellence. McCain was strong, confronted Obama -- but undermined himself with snarkiness and behavioral pettiness.

But McCain needed more than a tie and didn't get it. His eye rolls were really bad.

OK. . .I'm so glad that these are done.

McCain and Obama tied -- but that wasn't good enough for John McCain.

-- Steve Clemons

One of these days, I'm going to post a long roster of foreign policy speeches and other writing by Senator Chuck Hagel. I'll set The Washington Note up as the journal of record of "Hagelism" since I believe that we as a nation are going to be repeatedly coming back to his strategically sensible framework for thinking about national security and international political and policy issues.

Slowly, I've been weazling out of America's national security bureaucracy a Hagel letter here and there that was addressed to Condi Rice or President Bush or some other significant player in the incumbent administration who ether contributed to or didn't stop the swift erosion of America's national security portfolio.

Hagel has been a trooper trying to help the Bush administration see the dangers ahead. He has been writing these thoughtful, prescient letters for years -- and thus far, only a couple have seen the light of day.

Essentially, Chuck Hagel has reinforced over and over again that America needs to balance between stewardship of its core interests on the one hand, and on the other help to responsibly expand when it can prosperity, stability, democratic norms and self-determination.

He is the "no false choice" guy. He doesn't burn bridges. He believes in principled, englightened American engagement in global affairs. He doesn't want to see the US national security bureaucracy in a false standoff between Israel's security interests and the Arab Middle East's longer term objectives of stability and prosperity -- and knows that America must not choose one over the other.

Hagel has opposed false trade-offs between embracing Eastern European nations (and even helping to create new ones) and Russia's serious national priorities. He gets how transnational threats are challenging the fabric of states -- not just networked, transnational terrorism but also refugee, disease, poverty and climate change crises.

Hagel believes in game-changing strategies with Iran. I think he probably thinks along the same lines when it comes to Syria and possibly even Cuba. To some degree, putting Syria on a new track robs Iran of some running room in much the same way that opening the spigots of engagement with Cuba rob Hugo Chavez of maneuvering room in Latin America.

Hagel is a hard-edged negotiator who has a vision of alternative equilibriums and is not an appeaser of global (or Senate) thugs. Like few others in the Senate -- with perhaps Biden, Dodd, Feingold, Lugar, and formerly Lincoln Chafee as excepetions -- Hagel knows that diplomacy is the more important force that must be deployed in such a way that process generates previously concealed or obscure openings and opportunities.

I have spoken to Senator Hagel on several occasions and believe that he thinks America must not wall itself off from enemies but must engage, wrestle with, intimidate, and seduce them. This, Hagel feels, may be the only method America has at its disposal to leap frog out of the quagmire it is in today into a new equilibrium, establishing a redrawn "deal" with other global stakeholders.

The world is at a historical pivot point -- and America is too slowly realizing that inertia and incrementalism are keeping it from shaking up things and getting ahead of events in a new and constructive way. America's foreign policy today is ad hoc, reactive -- with little regard to what we hope the world will look like and what our place in world affairs will be decades from now.

At heart, Hagel is an evolved, internationally progressive Richard Nixon -- and I wish that he had found himself debating either Barack Obama or John McCain tonight. But he won't be president -- at least not this round -- but he is the right guy to be Secretary of State in the next administration.

I think Obama will win on November 4th -- but I'm not offering this as an endorsement. It's just where very strong winds are blowing -- and to a certain degree, strikingly large macro factors have given Obama a tail wind that is covering up both the strengths and weaknesses of candidate Obama. Unless another large exogenous hit bursts on the American political scene, circumstances will push Barack Obama strongly forward into 1600 Pennsylvania.

But whether or not Obama wins the White House, Chuck Hagel would be the right Secretary of State for either McCain or Obama. McCain's flirtation with an expansive, neoconservative agenda has been terrible for his campaign and has frightened Americans and much of the world with its calloused hubris.

I think that there are other good candidates to be chief diplomat -- including Senator John Kerry who seems to want a post of major import in the next administration and yes, even Richard Holbrooke who has it in his DNA to play that role one day.

But when Senator Obama chose Joe Biden to be his Vice Presidential choice, to some degree that lessened the near term need (they would be ideal for round two appointments) for either Holbrooke who is a well-seasoned, progressively focused arm-twister (like no other in international affairs) and for John Kerry who basically looks a lot like Biden in his foreign policy views.

But Hagel is Nixon -- more so than any of the candidates who ran for office -- more than Obama, Biden, Dodd, Huckabee, Brownback, McCain, Romney, Edwards, Clinton, Tancredo, Paul -- even Bill Richardson.

And this next administration needs a 21st century Nixonian hand who thinks naturally in those terms and sees the third and fourth and fifth dimension to problems -- who understands that interests are not only national but international in impact and consequence and who understands that the wall separating economics and national security is false and should figure into Obama's next "World Without Walls" speech.

Senator Hagel has been in Asia the last several days -- visiting Japan, China, and South Korea -- getting a sense of the strategic situation surrounding the seeming accomplishments of Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill in getting North Korea to agree again to invasive nuclear program inspections and further disabling its nuclear capacity in exchange for the US dropping it from the state sponsors of terror list.

Hagel is also taking stock of what China's and Japan's next moves in the global economy might look like -- and how they are viewing America's situation after much of the world is fuming at America for exporting poisoned financial products that virally spread leveling some of the world's largest economic firms and nations.

On the home front, Hagel's wife, Lilibet, will be watching the presidential debates tonight with Michelle Obama. Lilibet Hagel has endorsed Barack Obama for president, and Chuck Hagel has remained quiet for the time being.

Rumors are swirling that Chuck Hagel -- and Colin Powell -- may both endorse Barack Obama in the days shortly after this debate. I have no idea if that is true -- and to some degree it doesn't matter.

In the case of Powell -- he is a sensible national security realist and cautious general who Obama (if he wins) should solicit advice from frequently.

But at the State Department, Chuck Hagel is the right guy to work with Barack Obama and Joe Biden in helping to move a mostly liberal administration towards a Nixonian direction that may feel alien and uncomfortable.

This is essentially what Bill Clinton did when he came into office and found despite his lack of interest in foreign policy (then) that Yeltsin's Russia was imploding. Clinton got on the phone with Nixon and began a set of encounters and tutorials that helped Clinton manage the Russia challenge -- and which helped contribute to the national rehabilitation of Richard Nixon in the eyes of many.

Many of Senator and possibly President Obama's close retainers and acolytes may cringe at the thought of channeling Richard Nixon -- but they will need his approach to global affairs in a time marked by the globally perceived decline of American moral, military and economic leadership.

Senator Chuck Hagel is trusted around the world, respected -- and not for being nice -- but rather for being straightforward with friends and rivals about the poorly understood fact that there are nearly always opportunities in persistent diplomacy and statecraft.

And most importantly, Chuck Hagel is the right guy to help an Obama administration embrace its "inner Nixon."

-- Steve Clemons

Financial Times correspondents Daniel Dombey and Carola Hoyos have an interesting alert in today's paper. They write:

Pipelines vital to Iraq's oil industry are in such poor condition they could rupture at any time, choking off the supply of oil from the region and devastating the country's economy, according to the US State Department.

A previously undisclosed notification to the US Congress, obtained by the Financial Times, says the ageing underwater pipelines, which link storage facilities near Basra to offshore tanker fuelling terminals, are in urgent need of back-up or repair. "The likelihood of a worst-case catastrophic failure, subsequent collapse of Iraqi crude oil export revenue resulting in a devastating drop in the Iraqi GDP, global economic market impacts and a possible ecological and environmental disaster should warrant concern," the document says.

This raises the interesting question of whether Iraq, given its robust surpluses, should be responsbible for pipeline retrofitting -- or whether the US should make it a priority?

Or perhaps maybe Iran will swoop to the rescue?

-- Steve Clemons

Yesterday in Baghdad,Turkish leaders met with Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, for the first time in four years.

Ankara's decision to meet with Barzani indicates its recognition that preventing the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) from launching attacks along the Turkish-Iraqi border will prove impossible without the support of the semi-autonomous Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq. Ankara had previously refused to meet with President Barzani to avoid legitimizing his government and because of concerns that it is supporting the PKK and may be selling weapons to the separatist group.

Today's meeting comes on the heels of the Turkish parliament's decision last week to reauthorize military operations against the PKK in northern Iraq and amidst a recent escalation of hostilities. A battle on October 4 killed 15 Turkish soldiers and 23 PKK rebels.

Whether today's talks will lead to closer collaboration between Turkey and the KRG remains unclear. The KRG vociferously condemned the recent attacks and claims to be taking steps to prevent the PKK from operating within its territory.

Senator Chuck Hagel's wife, Lilibet, may be watching the debates tonight with Michelle Obama at Hofstra University in Long Island, New York -- but I'll be watching (and live-blogging as usual) in Barack Obama's home base city, Chicago.

For any who want to try and assemble a TWN coffee hour, I'll be staying at 401 North Wabash - so if it's close by and there's an interested group that can agree on a time - I'm happy to meet and chat.

I'll be in the windy city until Sunday.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

(I would have loved to have been the official blogger with these guys. . .)

When I started The Washington Note, my colleagues (particularly my boss) were not thrilled. They didn't get what a blog was and didn't understand how a blog could be an oped a day, could help agitate for a better world, could help sink a UN Ambassador's confirmation bid in the Senate, or how it was a sounding board for bad and good ideas to share with others eager to zap the blogger with feedback.

Fortunately, their disinterest in blogging gave me the space to build it up and experiment. Now, lots of others are into the game -- and the New America Foundation has embraced the medium strongly. Even our relatively new president, Steve Coll who moonlights as a Pulitzer Prize writing book author and staff writer for the New Yorker has a blog situated at the magazine titled "Think Tank." Some of my other education policy colleagues launched Higher Ed Watch which broke the student loan scandal last year. We also have the American Strategist and even The Havana Note where former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson is blogging up a storm.

And with a foot inside New America and one in the the private world of nuclear wonks, my friend and colleague Jeffrey Lewis publishes Arms Control Wonk.

But now the British Embassy has launched a new blog. I became one of the first in the blogosphere to pay tribute to its eventual emergence in a funny piece that suggested that John Cleese be its online introducer and occasional big ideas narrator. My understanding is that they tried to secure Cleese -- but he's under water somewhere. It would be soooo good with Cleese.

In any case, the British Embassy is at it -- and the staff there are following in the able footsteps of British Foreign Minister David Miliband's committed (and candid) blogging.

I see that the roster of bloggers includes British Ambassador Nigel Sheinwald -- who has been very good at using his dinner convening power to assemble some of the most interesting political observers in Washington. Only problem is that he's not going to be able to blog most of the cool stuff he hears as its just about always off the record (except for maybe. . .Gordon Brown and David Miliband).

Frequently, people lean over to me and tell me something is off the record as they think I'll divulge stuff I perhaps shouldn't. But really -- I never do. Really, I don't. . .

I can't wait until people begin telling Ambassador Sheinwald, "Please Nigel. . .off the record, OK?"

Just the other evening, the Ambassador was kind enough to invite me to join Joe Trippi, Stuart Rothenberg and Michael Barone in a discussion with one of the UK's foreign secretaries. I can say it happened -- but won't convey the fascinating discussion we all had that night. I wish we had recorded it.

But I do very much hope that the Ambassador finds his blogging voice and posts something soon.

And the only other recommendation I have for my new British blogging colleagues is that they replace those rather stiff yearbook photo mug shots with ones showing them with their respective pets, or perhaps playing their favorite sport. . .

At least something more Cleese-friendly.

-- Steve Clemons

The late William F. Buckley's son, the talented writer and thinker -- Christopher Buckley -- surprised many with his brave decision to endorse Barack Obama recently.

His announcement created a storm among National Review editors. According to reports, he offered to resign. And it took a nanosecond for the magazine to accept that resignation.

Some will think that this is good. I don't. It's not wise to have such rigid ideological lines in publications that fair-minded thinking can't be supported, debated, and embraced in process if not in substance.

Bill Buckley opposed George W. Bush's war in Iraq. He was an independent thinker who also would have difficulties with the Republican party that has been recently sculpted.

The father would not have accepted the resignation of the son -- and instead might have debated him in a set of catchy columns.

National Review just made itself less relevant to the future of the nation.

-- Steve Clemons

I was just invited to a fundraising dinner for the US-China Education Trust and FY Chang Foundation honoring Treasury Secretary Henry "Hank" Paulson, Jr. The dinner is Friday November 14th.

All I can say is best of luck. In case Paulson drops out, perhaps Paul Krugman will be a massively bigger draw.

-- Steve Clemons

The canada geese are back in town, and here's a few of them just off my back porch in Chestertown, Maryland.

-- Steve Clemons

Intrade's future markets are surging in support of a likely Obama win in the presidential race.

Just a couple of weeks ago, one could buy an Obama contract for 40, and it's now 77.7. McCain's contract is now at 23.1 after having been at about 56. If one feels strongly that McCain is going to lose this race, you could make a tidy bundle by shorting the McCain contract.

Intrade's electoral vote predictor now has Obama scoring 364 votes and McCain 174.

The Washington Post on the other hand has a more sober assessment of 168 solid Dem votes, 174 solid GOP votes, and 196 swing votes not fully solidified.

It is interesting that McCain's solid 174 are exactly the same as Intrade's 174 -- which means that according to Intrade's scales, Obama is picking up just about every state that isn't solidly GOP. Chris Bowers also takes a nice whack at the Washington Post numbers.

On other fronts, Zogby is just out with a release that Obama is at 49% and McCain slips to 43%.

538.com has Obama turning 349 electoral votes in with McCain at 189.

Finally, Gallup has Obama at 51% and McCain at 42%.

-- Steve Clemons

Editor's Note: Thanks to Brad DeLong for alerting me to some of this material.

German Bundestag Member Volker Beck is a great guy -- a hard-driving idealist who works hard on environmental improvement, gay rights, and global human rights. Beck was detained and beaten up by Russian police when he tried to advocate for a gay rights parade in Moscow.

I look forward to seeing him when I attend the German Green Party Convention in Erfurt, Germany this year -- and he happens to be a Facebook pal.

On Facebook recently, Volker Beck supports and is a major "recruiter" for a group organized to "Call Facebook to delete all Hate groups against Israel." The profile reads:

Have a look at this group -

http://stjohns.facebook.com/grou...

Despite its Terms of use ( http://www.facebook.com/terms.php) , which clearly state that the site can't be used to - "upload, post, transmit, share, store or otherwise make available content that would constitute, encourage or provide instructions for a criminal offense, violate the rights of any party, or that would otherwise create liability or violate any local, state, national or international law;", this group just keeps growing!

Please send this to as many people as possible, to join this cause - tell them to report this group by going to their page, and clicking on 'Report Group' on the bottom left of the page!

Thanks for your support!

I was not able to click through to the St. Johns site as it was an incomplete URL in the facebook profile.

But while I completely agree that hate groups against Israel should not be tolerated in public environments like Facebook, I think that all hate groups should not be tolerated.

That means against Muslims too.

Here, for instance, is a facebook page advocating that people watch this new, disgusting depiction of Muslims and Islam titled Obsession.

I have watched the film, and it reminds me of the worst kind of wholesale character assassination of a culture and people that used to be done in pre-Civil Rights days against African-Americans, in the 1950s and 1960s against gays, against Hispanics, Vietnamese and others. It ties visuals of the acts and beliefs of some of Islam's worst outliers and then generalizes across an entire culture.

Obsession is gross bigotry -- and someone behind that bigotry sent out more than 28 milliion of these CDs to homes across the United States in this election season. Why? To educate about Islam? Or to try and further ratchet up fear in the U.S. among voters and to promote bigotry against Muslims? I think the latter.

So to my friend Volker Beck -- whose facebook effort to stand against Israel hate groups is admirable -- I strongly encourage you to modify your efforts to include hate groups in general -- and specifically hate groups against Muslims.

-- Steve Clemons

If he does, then this exchange has got to be a top ten example of a self-inflicted mortal wound.

Coleman has now reported that he buys his own suits and that because of his contemplation of sin and atonement during Yom Kippur is pulling his approved negative ads that have been running against challenger Al Franken.

-- Steve Clemons

In a documentary titled "Torturing Democracy" that has recently aired on PBS, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage stated:

There is no question in my mind -- there's no question in any reasonable human being, that this is torture. I'm ashamed that we're even having this discussion.

Here is the short clip:

The National Security Archive Project at George Washington University has created one of the most important portals publicly available of the video clips, documentary materials, statements and other valuable resources on the journalism, litigation, scholarship and advocacy surrounding America's management of post-9/11 combat detainees.

-- Steve Clemons

I've had a number of emails from folks suggesting I am disrespecting the hardworking campaign canvassers and volunteers working hard on the Obama campaign for having reported that at least two paying guests at the Obama fundraiser last night in Philadelphia thought that there was a bit of "inevitability" woven into the evening.

First, I mean no disrespect to any campaign workers. My comments are not about you and what you are trying to do. My comments were about a dinner and the atmosphere there.

Second, my job is not to get Barack Obama elected. I respect those trying to get him into the White House and generally think on most days that that is what I want to -- but don't confuse this blog as an advocacy shop for Barack Obama or for John McCain.

Most importantly though, if the Obama team is going to succeed, it needs to feel and hear feedback -- just like I do on this blog and elsewhere. I stand by the report I offered.

Hillary Clinton ran on "inevitability" at one point during her primary challenge, and this, I think, contributed to her losing. I believe it would be a mistake for Obama to tilt in that direction -- and while some say that that observation is not what they are seeing, I am hearing that kind of trend from multiple sources.

So, best thing to do is for the campaign to hear the comments whispered by some of their paying supporters, adjust, and move on. Obama is probably going to win this race -- but there are hiccups that can occur and too much confidence about the end game can be harmful. . .from my point of view. And given that this is my blog, my point of view is what matters here.

But I do wish all canvass workers and those in the field for either campaign, but particularly Obama's in this case, all the best. The more I get to know Obama, the more I tend to like him and what he stands for -- but I will not acquiesce to what I consider to be sloppy or misguided politics or policy. Those that want a blog just to be part of the sound machine in favor of Obama with no questions or feedback really need to read other stuff.

One more interesting thing on the dinner though is that it was the biggest fundraiser -- as measure by funds raised -- in the history of Pennsylvania, estimated at $5 million.

One of the funnier things I have heard out of the evening was that the hosts didn't seat Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell at Obama's table -- and Rendell spent much of the evening letting just about everyone in earshot know he was none too pleased. . .

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

I have heard from two attendees who along with 198 other business and social leaders had dinner with Barack Obama last night in Philadelphia.

One said that the whole evening "looked like a victory lap to me." The other attendee agreed with that assessment.

Overconfidence and the posture of inevitability KILLS campaigns.

Obama and his team better get out of the "we have already won" mode real fast or John McCain and his campaign may pull off yet another risen from the dead miracle.

-- Steve Clemons

The U.S. will now remove North Korea from the state sponsors of terror list.

Vice President Cheney and John Bolton must have migraines today.

Congratulations to Condoleezza Rice and Assistant Secretary of State for Christopher Hill. This has been a shrewdly negotiated and tough uphill kind of agreement with the North Koreans -- and the world may be safer for it.

-- Steve Clemons

Watch out for her bite.

Eight Republicans and four Democrats of Alaska's Legislative Council unanimously voted to release a report stating Alaska Governor and GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin abused her powers in firing Alaska Commissioner of Public Safety Walt Monegan in part for his refusing to terminate the employment of a former brother-in-law of Palin's with whom she was personally feuding.

In a 263-page report, investigator Steve Branchlower stated "I find that Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110 (a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act."

Here is a pdf of the report.

-- Steve Clemons

I hinted I had something fun on Wednesday, but the folks at Opinio Juris and UN Dispatch put it out before I had the chance. Sarah Palin is a strong supporter of U.S. accession to the Law of the Sea Convention. She (or more likely someone on her staff with her full support) understands how the Convention works and how it will positively benefit Alaska and the U.S.

Palin sent a letter to Sens. Stevens and Murkowski in 2007 proclaiming her unqualified support. The money quote:

However, as you know, ratification has been thwarted by a small group of senators concerned about the perceived loss of U.S. sovereignty. I believe quite the contrary is the case. If the U.S. does not ratify the convention, we will be denied access to the forum established by the international community to adjudicate claims to submerged lands in the arctic.

That's something Senator McCain might have said not so long ago, but he won't stand by what he knows is right for the Navy, business, the environment and the country's national security. Will Gov. Palin?

-- Scott Paul

Two Additional Notes: First, Palin has also apparently invested in mutual funds with holdings in companies that help the Sudanese government. She says she'll divest. Second, a hearty congratulations to Martti Ahtisaari, a first-class peacemaker who has built bridges and trust for decades among groups facing a broad range of challenges. Bravo.

Free Webcam Chat at Ustream

Four years ago, Osama bin Laden chronicler and CNN and New America Foundation terrorism expert PETER BERGEN, The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib author and NYU Center on Law and Security Director KAREN GREENBERG, and I organized a day long mega-meeting of the world's best and brightest al Qaeda watchers. "Al Qaeda 2.0" (edited volume from conference here) assembled Western and Non-Western journalists including Yosri Fouda, Hamid Mir, Rohan Gunaratna and others who had interviewed the chiefs of al Qaeda or those who had masterminded the 9/11 terrorist attacks -- and those trying to catch them like Richard Clarke and Michael Scheuer.

I am really pleased to say that populist writer and opinion leader Abdel Bari Atwan will be with us in this conference this year. Four years ago, the U.S. government would not allow him a visa because he was considered too hot given his political views about the so-called "war on terror." The State Department did arrange this time for him to have a visa -- and we think some progress has been made over there in Foggy Bottom.

We are back with an update -- AL QAEDA 3.0 -- which the New America Foundation and NYU Center on Law and Security are co-sponsoring.

This meeting takes place today and will STREAM LIVE over the blog and run live from 9 am until 5:15 pm on C-Span 2 today.

I will be moderating the meeting along with Greenberg and Bergen. Both an audio file and video file of the entire event will later be posted on my blog.

Special thanks to Senator Chuck Hagel and his staff, as well as the staff of the U.S. Senate Rules Committee for accommodating our rather large request of having this meeting all day in one of the most dramatic and historic rooms in the U.S. Senate -- the Russell Senate Office Building Caucus Room. It is where the Titanic hearings, the Watergate hearings, and even the Harry Truman-led 1940 war profiteering hearings took place.

Here is the general schedule of today's event:

Here would be an interesting line of defense in Senator Norm Coleman's brewing scandal.

Perhaps Coleman just BORROWED the suits -- and wore temporarily -- a few times -- and then returned them to friend and campaign supporter Nasser Kazeminy.

Note to the press: Ask the spokesman if Coleman just took a few loaners. . .

-- Steve Clemons

Thanks to Politico's Ben Smith for sending this our way.

This is the most painful press engagement between a campaign spokesman and a "polite, but persistent" group of media I have ever seen.

Let's just hope that Al Franken buys all of his own suits.

As American Prospect executive editor Mark Schmitt just wrote in a note, the media between now and election day will just keep asking "who was paying for [Norm Coleman's] suits, his gas bill, his rent, his wife's salary, etc."

Adding to the fun, Mark Leon Goldberg of UN Dispatch shared with me, "Oh, how I wish Kofi Annan would travel to Minneapolis to demand Coleman's resignation." That is exactly what John Bolton's best friend in the Senate, Norm Coleman, did to Annan.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

This is important and is more evidence of the dismantling of George W. Bush's imperial presidency.

Federal District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina has ordered the release by the end of this week of 17 Guantanamo detainees who happen to be Uighers.

Very significant news that raises questions about who these people really are, what they were doing, why America held them for six years in detention, and what blowback we may suffer yet for this mess.

-- Steve Clemons

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

My colleague Michael Lind -- who is Senior Fellow and Director of the New America Foundation's American Infrastructure Initiative -- offered some thoughts on what the future might look like over at The New Republic's "The Plank".

His entire, short essay deserves a read, but I particularly liked this last section, and particularly found the last paragraph intriguing:

The U.S. economy a decade from now may be dominated by a few huge universal banks and a small number of gigantic corporations, all of them "too big to fail." In return for implicit government bail-out guarantees, these swollen private-sector Leviathans will abandon "greed is good" rhetoric for noble sentiments about corporate responsibility. The emerging system might be called "lemon corporatism." A managerial state dominated by oligopolies and monopolies, where government encourages employer paternalism as an alternative to public welfare spending, would resemble contemporary Japan and the dystopian America of "Rollerball."

Barring new, unavoidable conflicts, the Pentagon is also likely to be downsized, following the reduction of the U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. will remain the leading great power, but there will be no new American century, nor will Europe, hit even worse than the U.S., be a plausible partner in a Pax Atlantica. As in the 1970s, the U.S. will find itself in a multipolar world, struggling in both the commercial and the military arenas.

Hegel called this kind of irony "the cunning of history." Beginning in the 1970s, libertarians and neoliberals promised that deregulation would produce a borderless utopia for small enterprises and entrepreneurs. Instead, the result of free market fundamentalism is a global financial collapse that may produce an America with bigger government, more paternalism, and a financial and corporate oligopoly.

-- Steve Clemons

I never learned to play a musical instrument. I have huge, widespread hands and should have been a pianist.

One of my real DC letdowns is not figuring out how to get Condi Rice over to my house to play a baby grand piano I won at a Regal Cinema sweepstakes the night Team America: World Police opened. Don't ask me about this unless you have seen the movie, including the puppet sex scenes. I do wonder if Kim Jong Il saw it.

Since I'm so musically untalented, I have to vicariously enjoy the musical talents of friends -- and for those of you in DC -- "Suspicious Package" is the new hot sound.

The seditiously-branded band includes the Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist TOM TOLES, the U.S. Trade Representative's hottest bureaucrat CHRISTINA SEVILLA as well as Bloomberg's TIM BURGER, the Los Angeles Times' terrorist-watching JOSH MEYER, and Housing and Urban Development (no. . .he's not the one responsible for the meltdown) BRYAN GREENE.

Suspicious Package, thus far has avoided the more predictable track of YouTubing its performances and launching a fan website -- but is instead relying on guerilla blog marketing to let the world know where it might catch a glimpse of "the package".

Tomorrow night -- Friday, 10 October -- at "The Red and the Black" at 1212 H Street. Show starts at 9 pm and Tom Toles recommends drinking before and after.

I am having drinks with someone on the FBI's watch list (seriously. . .) and then din-din with an Ambassador who is suspiciously cool -- but hope to catch the tail end songs of the band's next flight.

-- Steve Clemons

Here is an 8-minute plus clip of an interview I did with economist and Obama team adviser James K. "Jamie" Galbraith of the LBJ School at the University of Texas at Austin.

The sound is OK but not going to win any academy awards (message to my colleagues -- work on it). It's not hard to hear...just could be better.

Galbraith is the author of The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too , which he also talked about at this New America Foundation event.

More soon -- giving a lecture about Congressional impact on U.S. foreign policy to a political science class at the 1782-founded Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.

My focus, of course, will be the guy I wish had run for President of the United States and who I hope is soon Secretary of State, Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE).

-- Steve Clemons

Ronald Lauder, the driving force behind New Yorkers for Term Limits, says he opposes an amendment to the term limit laws to allow three terms. He says he only agreed to a one-time exception for this mayor at this moment. Of course, if term limits don't apply in difficult circumstances or to excellent public servants (and I think we have both in the current situation), they serve no purpose whatsoever except to prevent bad to decent public servants from making their case for additional servants.

This has put Mayor Bloomberg in the awkward position of denying that he's after a self-serving exception to the rules (which he obviously is) as he pursues term limit reform. It's a tough illusion to maintain, especially since Bloomberg has been holding strategy sessions on how to extend his tenure for about a year.

I'm only going to be able to post on this occasionally, but if you're interested, check out my childhood friend Matt Dreyer's Provisionally Titled blog. He's been winning arguments since age 6. Plus we see eye to eye on this Bloomberg business and he says he'll be tracking it pretty closely.

In the meantime, check out these folks if you're as strongly opposed to the change as I am. As an aside, I've found out that the staff in the legislative office of my City Council simply don't answer the phone.

I'm headed offline for the Jewish holiday but check back Friday for a great Law of the Sea nugget. It's pinging around the internet now among supporters so it won't be breaking, but it's a good one. Even you folks who think you've had enough of UNCLOS might be interested.

-- Scott Paul

I have a friend, Roee, who just sent me moving personal commentary of his own thinking about sin and atonement in the context of spending time with a Chinese immigrant family in San Francisco.

I am not going to post his piece -- but it did remind me that Yom Kippur starts tonight. The conclusion of Yom Kippur tomorrow evening will end the period of atonement between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. . .and the year 5769 in the Hebrew calendar proceeds.

A "blessed" Yom Kippur to all.

-- Steve Clemons

Update: I modified the post above to say a "blessed Yom Kippur" rather than a "happy" one -- which would ring odd to many who are focused on atoning for sins they are considering. I have been told by a loyal reader who nicely reached out that this is a more solemn Jewish holiday. Thanks for the counsel -- and all the best to those celebrating this holiday.

First question is on the economy.

Both Obama and McCain are doing well in responding to a person's query about what to do with the average family being undermined by current economic conditions. John McCain and Obama both started to walk around and try to talk to the audience. McCain got more personal folks and pointed to young people he said were being stuck with a "$10 trillion debt".

Wow. Obama just mentioned Warren Buffet specifically as a Treasury Secretary possibility. If we are going to be way out there -- I'd prefer George Soros actually.

A second question about the economy. . .What will help regular people out?

McCain says Main Street was paying a high price for the greed and excess of Wall Street. McCain just reminded people he suspended his campaign to go back and deal with the financial crisis. McCain probably reminded a lot of folks that he engaged in some silly antics when he did that.

I can't quite believe that McCain just said that Obama was the recipient of the second greatest amount of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac financial support when his own campaign chairman was an active lobbyist for Fannie and Freddy.

Obama now responding -- he comes off as eruduite, informed, thoughtful -- but he's more distant from the audience than McCain who seems to drill into them more quickly and effectively (from my point of view).

Obama is giving a pretty honest, straight answer about how we're going to need to approach this economic problem -- particularly saying that we are on the front end of the problem and have a long way to go. Brokaw pushed Obama to comment on whether he thought things would get worse -- and Obama said no.

McCain said it depends "on what we do." Neither wants to tell Americans things are going to get worse -- which is too bad, because things are going to get worse.

3rd question -- How can folks trust either McCain or Obama since both parties were complicit in the conditions that led to the financial crisis?

Obama is doing a reasonable job explaining how the U.S. got into its current mess during the big debt build up of the George W. Bush administration. I wish he wouldn't keep saying "And, And, And. . ." It's distracting.

McCain is saying that he's one of the gladiators against special interests, crony interests -- he accused Obama of never taking on his party leadership on any issue.

I'm watching tonight with a friend in the military who is supportive of McCain and thinks that McCain is "really off tonight."

Health, Energy, Entitlement Reforms?

McCain says we need to reform social security and medicare and that we can't do for future recipients of entitlements what we have done in the past. McCain also says that we need a whole lot of new nuclear plants in addition to a long roster of other alternatives. McCain doesn't want to distinguish between these as far as their importance.

Obama says we have to prioritize. He is putting energy security on top. . .and he's connecting it to going to the moon. Big idea. Big project.

Second priority for Obama is health -- and then education.

A question is asked about what sacrifices McCain or Obama are going to ask Americans to make.

McCain says he is going to ask Americans to go without some of the programs we spend money on -- his first answer was odd. . .corrupt defense programs. Not sure how the 78 year old lady in Chicago who lived through the depression relates to that.

McCain just said he would do across the board freeze on government spending -- except in defense. Defense is the problem! We spend more money on our defense and security than all nations in the world combined and don't feel safe. That's a management problem but McCain doesn't seem to want to wrestle that down.

Obama is reminding people that after 9/11, George Bush told citizens that they could help "by going out to shop." Happiness and stability through gluttony. . .

Obama is playing the "buy America" card of promising eco-friendly cars manufactured in the U.S. rather than Japan and Korea. Interesting way to appeal to the blue collar set.

Obama is smoother in this discussion than the first debate. Easier to follow him. He's doing well.

Obama has just done a great job explaining his approach to taxes -- who will get taxed more (the very rich) and who won't carry as much burden (the rest).

McCain just called for a Commission on Medicare -- weak response. Commissions are not a way to convince Americans that one is ready to make tough, hard choices. Commissions are usually fig leaves for perpetuating the status quo.

Green jobs, environmental change. . .ball to McCain. McCain is pushing nuclear power really hard, which does surprise me. Nuclear power has to figure into the equation in my view, but we need caution, much more research on how to generate safe nuclear power with minimal or no waste -- and McCain just asserts that that will happen. A major nuclear build out here in the US and elsewhere will also jumpstart the spread of nuclear plants globally. Should we be worried about that? I think so -- but McCain seems not to care about that.

Tom Brokaw is not a very fun curmudgeon.

Did I hear McCain make the case that Obama is for oil company giveaways and McCain against. We are truly living in an Orwellian world.

McCain actually pointed to Obama and called him "that one." Yikes. . .a lot of undercurrents there that some with imagination might be offended by.

Health care. . .Honestly, both are failing to really convince the public that they have a clear-headed, stable, doable plan. I prefer Obama's approach by far -- but the lines are not sticking. Both are coming off as sincere -- but nothing Obama or McCain is saying is memorable. . .perhaps McCain's line as a refundable $5,000 tax credit.

Barack Obama is making the case, compellingly (finally), that health care should be a right -- not a responsibility alone. He referred to what a tragedy it is that his mother, or anyone, has to fight insurance companies when they are dying from cancer at 50 years old. . .personal, compelling.

They are both better than the last debate -- but Obama's improvement is really dramatic.

Great question on what constraints the deteriorating economy will have on America's national security policy.

"America is the greatest force for good in the history of the world," says McCain. "We are peacemakers." Reflecting on where we have been and how eroded America's national security position is, McCain's answer is very wrongheaded.

McCain is going after Obama on Georgia-Russia, on the surge, and other issues. He said there is no time "for on the job training." But then why does McCain have a running mate, Sarah Palin, who clearly needs a couple of other internships before applying for on the job training?

Touche. Obama is making the connection between the Iraq War's costs and America's belieaguered economy. Finally. That is right. We have to get out of the Iraq War. Along with a lot of other bad consumption habits, engaging in one of the nation's most expensive wars without raising taxes to pay for it has hit America's middle class really hard.

Interesting question -- what is the Obama doctrine of use of force? He's not giving a direct answer. He's starting with genocides that America should have intervened in -- and then moved to national interest led decisions as benchmarks for determining priorities. Obama then discussed the leverage that we get from allies. Decent answer -- but could be much better. Denis McDonough, one of Obama's key foreign policy advisors, could have slammed that question out of the park.

McCain is back on Iraq -- accuses Obama of embracing an attitude of defeat who would have brought the troops home early.

The Pakistan question is a quagmire for Obama. Pakistan is in the nuclear club. It's just different than other countries, and McCain is right that we shouldn't disregard Pakistan's sovereignty when overtly discussing these security matters. What we have to do in the shadows may be a different matter.

Obama just countered with a slam of McCain for singing about bombing Iran, threatening to annihilate North Korea, and other bravado against other countries.

This just in from a true political independent who currently works in the Bush administration:

Steve,

This debate seems to be following the Biden/Palin debate format of Obama speaking more clearly and in depth than McCain and his simplistic responses.

I think the undecideds may be impressed with his calm rationality and unwillingness (Except foe the bs about energy independence) to preach the easy answers.

Sent from my iPhone

McCain talking about the surge, David Petraeus, securing victory with honor. . .

McCain says we are not going to have another Cold War with Russia -- and thinks that Russia's behavior is outside the bounds of acceptability. McCain just indirectly made fun of George W. Bush by saying that he "looked in the eyes of Vladimir Putin and saw a "K", a "G" and a "B".

McCain seems to be more balanced and less strident in his recommended challenges to Russian behavior than he did when the Georgia-Russia conflict was hotter.

Stupid question. Brokaw asks if Russia is an evil empire, as Reagan called it. Obama should have said NO.

McCain said MAYBE.

Nixon would be ticked off at both of them. That kind of silly name-calling does nothing to move American diplomacy or interests forward. Obama has got to be braver and stop falling into McCain-lite poses when big challenges are being discussed.

Now a question on Israel. McCain goes right to Iran -- but I don't think McCain got a briefing on the "Grand Bargain in US-Iran Relations" program that I presided over today with Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett.

Obama says that Iran can't be allowed to get a nuclear weapon. But what if it did??? Would we take the world into a new cataclysm or would we try to cultivate deterrence?

Obama shares his views that he wants to offer Iran a deal that encourages constructive behavior. I don't agree with all of Obama's posture on this -- but I have to say that he's compelling and so much smoother and better than in the first debate.

What don't you know -- and how will you learn it? Obama responds by saying that the nature of the challenges we face is immense. He's right. He's going off to tell his life story -- not telling Brokaw and the audience how he'd requisition the kind of expertise and experience needed to meet the shocks that are certainly headed our way.

Obama is screwing up a key question. No one may be noticing -- but I thought the question was the most important of the evening...or nearly so. No president will be able to know everything needed to manage the portfolios of the country. The key is requisitioning experience -- based on a world yesterday. And we need to see judgment and an approach to how that experience will be reconfigured to address tomorrow's challenges.

I would have liked to hear either Obama or McCain say that UNLIKE GEORGE W. BUSH, they will make sure to listen to every view at the table and consider every scenario - the good and the bad - before making crucial decisions about the vital interests of the nation. Obama missed an opportunity here.

McCain is saying he knows what its like to live through difficult times when the future is not known. But he too is not answering this excellent question well.

And it's over.

Quick review. It was occasionally mildly testy, but didn't break any new ground at all. This was a status quo debate.

Most of the answers by both were predictable.

In terms of style, Obama did better than he did during the first debate. McCain was smart but seemed more petty, and meaner -- but in an ineffective way.

Overall, this debate won't change a thing....It leaves everything in place.

I think Obama gets the win by a nose, but it's a win that hardly matters.

McCain -- since he's lagging in the polls -- needed to accomplish more than he did tonight. But Obama just didn't add much sizzle despite his greater smoothness and confidence.

OK -- that's it. No more debates.

Oh damn it -- we have one more of these.

Guys -- PLEASE make it better next time. . .!

-- Steve Clemons

I'll be live-blogging the debate tonight -- at home where I've been lounging a bit, still recovering from a night of too many pomegranate martinis with Israel/Palestine peace pusher Daniel Levy and a journalist I can't mention.

I had hoped to watch the debates with students at Washington College out on the Eastern Shore of Maryland's Chesapeake Bay -- but I've decided to meet them tomorrow rather than today to give my system a chance to recover more fully from that pomegranate juice.

But on other fronts. . .

China stops all military contacts with the U.S. . . .clearly, temporarily -- but we are seeing a real rollback of perceived American power. It's like the Russians have broken one index finger, and China is going to break the other. Being the next President of the United States is going to be a miserable experience.

Lehman CEO Punched in the Face at Gym. Ouch!

Gallup says Obama leads McCain 51% to 42% going into tonight's debate.

Today's stock drop is the worst since 1937. We are at a major pivot point in history. Down with the incrementalists.

For those who want to feel the way I do now. . .here is the recipe for Oprah's pomegranate martini.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

Streaming Video by Ustream.TV

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett will outline their thoughts on a "U.S.-Iran Grand Bargain" today at 12:00 noon EST at the New America Foundation. I'll be chairing the session.

The article titled "The Grand Bargain" that accompanies today's event can be read in the latest issue of the Washington Monthly.

A quick 4-minute primer on the subject with Flynt Leverett, who is a former CIA, State Department, and senior Bush administration National Security Council official, and his wife Hillary Mann Leverett, who also worked at the State Department and National Security Council on Iran policy, can be watched above.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

John McCain's sudden 360 180 (sorry, rushed) on the Law of the Sea Convention has come up before here. Despite ten years of energetic support for U.S. accession to the Convention, things changed last October without any explanation.

McCain attempted to justify this on principle, though it fell transparently flat. At least on immigration, he said (and I'm paraphrasing), the politics made me do it.

Based on McCain's long record of support for the Convention and the image below, a portion of his candidate questionnaire for the Iowa Christian Alliance survey (part 1; part 2), was this decision political or did it put Country First?

(courtesy of Caitlyn Antrim's invaluable Ocean Law Daily)

You decide. I think this speaks for itself.

-- Scott Paul

Streaming live video by Ustream

One of the nation's leading progressive economists, James K. Galbraith, will be speaking today about his new book, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, at the New America Foundation from 12:15 pm to 1:45 pm EST.

I will not be there as I will be over at the Department of State for a special reception and event that I'll write about this afternoon. But I will watch Galbraith afterwards -- and will post the video clip for others to see as well.

My colleagues Mark Schmitt -- who is the new Executive Editor of The American Prospect -- and Barry Lynn, Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation will offer comments; New America's Asset Building Program Research Director Reid Cramer will moderate.

James "Jamie" Galbraith -- son of close JFK adviser John Kenneth Galbraith -- is Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair of Government/Business Relations at the University of Texas at Austin and is former Executive Director of Joint Economic Committee in Congress.

He is one of the few economic voices that have been predicting today's economic mess, which just got messier with the increasing collapse of global markets that shrugged off President Bush's signing the bailout bill package Friday.

-- Steve Clemons

The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood is one of the most positive but emotionally destabilizing and unusual personal memoirs I have read in many years.

It tells the coming of age story of New York Times diplomatic correspondent Helene Cooper who started life as the privileged child of Liberian political aristocracy. Her DNA antecedents founded Liberia -- both Elijah Johnson and Randolph Cooper -- nationless Africans born in and living in America who were returned to establish a new colony on the African continent as an alternative to slavery.

I read Cooper's book in January 2008, many months before its scheduled September release date, and I've been struggling with the issues it raised ever since.

I told her I wanted to write a review right away -- and was told I'd pay a heavy price if I did. (She wanted me to wait -- so wait I have had to do.) The book was supposed to be out earlier in the summer, but got selected as Starbuck's September book of the month, which held up its release -- despite the fact that a serialized section of the book was already in the publication schedule and ran as a front cover story of the New York Times Magazine in April. I mentioned the book only in passing in a blog post about Cooper's sister, Marlene Cooper Vasilic, who had won a fishing contest in DC for her catch of a monstrous sized carp.

I've now gone from being one of the first who could have reviewed the book -- to one of the last now that incredible reviews have run in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and just about everywhere else.

But it doesn't matter. My own connection to this book is different than those who have offered praise for Helene Cooper's storytelling skills and her striking candor about a childhood world lost due to revolution and change in Liberia. I think that those have celebrated Helene Cooper's story have done the right thing -- but the book dug into me more deeply than I expected.

When I read Sugar Beach -- which I know she wrote and rewrote, and then rewrote, and rewrote again -- I felt some sense of the personal pain she went through as she tore her own soul apart to become the person she has today. This is her story, but in some sense, it's the story of many who have become successful and are proud and ashamed at the same time. I feel that way about myself some times as I didn't come from a life of privilege but wanted to believe that I did. My world was ripped apart when my father died on my first day of college -- and I've been creating, ripping apart, and recreating myself and who I was ever since.

Helene Cooper's childhood was best punctuated by the memories of her sisters -- one related by blood, Marlene, and the other adopted, Eunice -- in a 22 room house at Sugar Beach outside of Monrovia, Liberia.

Cooper's family was crowded with big personalities. Her uncle was foreign minister and was executed during the downfall of the Liberian government. Just about everyone in the government was a relative, or associated with relatives of her clan. Helene and her sisters watched her uncle and other relatives and friends die at the hand of executioners on television.

Her family connections on her father's and mother's side of the family were the equivalent of a hybrid of the Rockefellers and Jeffersons with a mix of the Andrew Jackson clan. This selection which references the "Cooper compound" gives one a flavor of where her family sat in Liberia's pecking order. Helene and her sister, Marlene, were spoiled children -- privileged would be an understatement given the less than miserable circumstances that so many others in Liberia suffered through each day. Eunice was adopted to be a playmate of Helene and Marlene -- and had her own family elsewhere -- but was taken in by the Cooper household as a real member of the family, a custom of sorts that Cooper's parents upgraded by making sure that their many servants never treated Eunice any different than the other two.

Then one day, the President of Liberia -- a man who had grown distant from the on the ground realities of those living in his country -- tried to raise the tax on rice. While many other factors interceded that helped a relatively stable nation disintegrate into run amok anarchy, the spark was this increase in the burden that those with the least in Liberian society had to pay. Ethnic and tribal divisions were already tense -- as they had been for decades. It didn't take much to finally get revolution to ignite. Such surcharges on basic foodstuffs have been significant destablizers in Kenya, Congo, Tanzania, and elsewhere.

But many died in the revolution that ensued. And social norms and habits -- at least those generated from the dominance of many by a privileged sect at the top -- came undone.

Helene Cooper tells the story of how her mother protected Eunice, Marlene and Helene from a marauding gang of US military-trained thugs loyal to Samuel Doe in the overthrow of the rice-tax raising democratically elected and subsequently assassinated President William Tolbert. The Cooper children were eyed by the renegade Liberian military at their home at Sugar Beach -- and Helene's mother negotiated with the soldiers to allow them to gang rape her while the children waited upstairs. Eunice, the adopted sister and daughter who had come from the roughest of life circumstances into privilege, calmed the other two and kept them from racing to their mother's aid.

Eunice and the Cooper family were separated when their mother and father -- divorced but friendly -- and the two daughters got visas to the United States. Eunice was left behind. Family members were executed or had everything, all of their possessions, stripped from them. The heirs of those who had established Liberia as a colony of Americanized Africans returning to their ancestral continent were decimated and run out of the country.

But the high drama of this story is not what moved me -- though I found myself embarrassingly ignorant about basic African history and the history of African-Americans here in the United States.

What got me was how Helene Cooper who is a top tier journalist in the United States survived the assault on her life and basic identity -- and then remade herself. The last part of her book talks about growing up in the South in an average home where she was no longer the spoiled child whose family had implied ownership of the same church pews for hundreds of years. Cooper never became ordinary -- nor did her sister's -- but she did somehow manage to navigate past the luxury of "things" and became a junky for the world of words and ideas.

I didn't grow up in a world torn apart by macro forces of the category 5 storms that ripped up Liberia's government and social structure -- but I was a product of a complicated homelife where I was constantly rebelling against the socialized blandness of military base culture in which my father and mother barely survived and which I found myself constantly gasping for air. The moment I escaped from my own young life circumstances, my dad died at the age of 39. And I feel that I've been cursed and blessed by the experiences I had before -- and somewhat of an occasional chameleon -- unable to be what I was when I grew up and given different options of who I wanted to become later.

Helene Cooper's story tore into me because her story was one of a brilliant writer and thinker -- now with America's top newspaper -- a privileged and emotionally crippled child who became something great. But sadly, millions of decent people -- decent either as kids of prominent people or decent as ordinary folks just trying to get ahead in the communities in which they live don't necessarily become the success story that Helene Cooper became.

But still her book honors them and speaks to those folks who have their lives torn up. It offers hope.

This summer, after many years of not seeing each other or being united, Helene and Marlene Cooper made arrangements for their lost sister, Eunice, to come back to the United States for a visit. Helene had found Eunice when she went back to Liberia after the fall of Charles Taylor and the installation of a new democratic government. Helene Cooper was honored as one of Liberia's most successful exports and had lunch with a number of other accomplished women with Liberia's new president.

But she found Eunice and this summer brought her to Alexandria, Virginia where I sat with Eunice and coaxed a number of the old stories out of this adopted Cooper sister and out of Helene's mother who is still a feisty and tough negotiator of life's big things and its nooks and crannies. I have tremendous respect for Helene Cooper's mother and sister Eunice -- as well as for Marlene and Helene Cooper for keeping family together despite the best effort of enormous forces to obliterate what they have with each other.

The Coopers have shared the kind of story that sells books and about which a movie will no doubt one day be made. Their lives were crushed and perforated by a change of course in Liberia's history -- but reading this book, for so many reasons -- the way Cooper wrote it in such an alarmingly basic way -- in the language and filter of of a young, naive girl -- where you sense her shock at a grittier life and feel her become aware, finally, after so many years. Helene Cooper's narrative is one that people all over America and the world could also call their own. . people everywhere who have to somehow cope with life-shocks the size of tsunamis.

I loved this book -- and it moves me to the edge of choking up when I delve into it. I've read it twice now, and had a hard time writing this review. . .though I think my friend Helene Cooper has been waiting. It's deep -- and everyone should read it.

Helene's mother used to call her "sea crab" when she was annoying, naughty, out of line -- it's almost a compliment. We need to be able to be something else on occasion to get beyond who we once were -- whether born high or born well but less materially endowed.

But to cap it off, I felt I had accomplished something when I got Helene's mother, Mrs. Cooper, to call me "sea crab." It may sound silly, but that gesture sort of leveled things out and helped me feel the power Helene's mother had to wrestle down life's dramas.

-- Steve Clemons