I’m not going to put Indiana in the Obama column based on one poll, but the Indianapolis Star is reporting that a poll they commissioned shows Obama leading in Indiana. It shows him leading 47-44% over McCain with something like 6% of people undecided and a 4% margin of error.

My completely unscientific methodology also shows Obama doing well — on Saturday, driving the 5 miles or so home from the Layflats Festival out by the Amphitheater in Lafayette, I saw 6 or 7 bumper stickers and yard signs for Obama compared to 1 for McCain. In the same area 4 years ago, I rarely saw much in the way of John Kerry signs.

I think the best we can say at this point is that Obama is doing awfully well in Indiana for a Democrat. Normally, the networks call Indiana about 1 minute after the polls close. This year, maybe they’ll have to wait a half hour or so. While I expect Obama to win this election, and I’d be tickled to see Indiana go for him; I am not holding my breath. At the least, the McCain campaign probably needs to feel a little skittish and to think about not taking Indiana votes completely for granted.

Nice, plain, straight forward message from Obama. Two minutes long. No particular digs at McCain. No ominous or snarky voice overs.

First, he describes some of the problems we’re having, says that Washington hasn’t met its responsibilities, then he proposes:
1) Tax reform with $1,000 “tax break to the middle class” instead of showering more on oil companies and corporations outsourcing jobs overseas.

2) Regulate Wall Street to protect pensions and investments.

3) Shift to American made energy.

4) Crack down on lobbyists.

5) End the war in Iraq and stop spending money to rebuild their country when ours needs attention.

For the wonks among us, there is a link to a more detailed description of Obama’s plans.

Sounds worth discussing to me, but I suppose the news media will go with LIPSTICK ON A PIG or MCCAIN INVENTED THE BLACKBERRY.

It was McCain’s economic adviser, old colleague, and former Senator Phil Gramm who suggested that the United States was merely in a “mental recession” and that complaining about the current economic conditions amounted to “whining.” From electoral-vote.com today, we get some insight into Gramm’s history, its relation to the current clusterfuck on Wall Street, and why it matters to McCain:

This nationalization [of insurance giant AIG] poses an especially large challenge for John McCain, who is now railing against corporate greed and lack of government regulation of the financial industry. What he doesn’t talk much about is how deregulation happened. It was the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that repealed the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act and thus eliminated the depression-era walls between between banking, investment, and insurance that made this crisis possible. Glass-Stegall erected walls between banking, investment management, and insurance, so problems in one sector could not spill over into the others, which is precisely what is happening now. The primary author of that legislation was none other than his economic advisor, former senator Phil Gramm (who thinks the country is in a “mental recession”). McCain fully supported the bill and has a decades-long track record of opposing government regulation of the financial industry. His new-found conversion to being a fan of regulation is going to be a tough sell as Obama is already pointing out that McCain got what he wanted (deregulation) and this is the consequence.

Now, it occurs to me that I have been ranting against the market and its disciples quite a bit lately. I don’t want anyone to get the idea that I think government is a panacea. I don’t. My rants have been a reaction which, Mr. Newton tells us, is equal and opposite to an initiating action. The action to which I am reacting is the constant drum beat on the right proclaiming, mostly as a matter of dogma, that markets can do no wrong. In some cases this dogma has a subtext that implies poor people are poor because they are lazy, stupid, and disfavored by God. The rich, on the other hand, are rich because they are hard working, industrious, and God loves them. Think I’m stretching on the God thing? It goes back to Calvinism and our rich Puritan heritage.

In theory, free markets, like communism, work great in practice. In practice, often times they don’t. Now, I’m going to go completely off the rails by dragging Aristotle into a post where I’ve already dredged up Newton, Calvin, and the Puritans. Aristotle and others noted that there is harmony to be found in the middle — the Golden Mean. The dogma of the free marketeers (and the Communists, if there are any left) leads to extremes that disrupts harmony and causes problems — probably due to Newtonian reactions. I always think of a sling shot. If you pull it as far as you can to blind market worship, it’s going to snap back on you.

Right now, we’re going through a bit of a snap back.

Richard Cohen, a columnist formerly in the tank for McCain, has a column on how McCain has soiled himself with dishonor. The stain has been growing since 2000, Cohen says, when McCain lied for political gain by concealing that he abhorred the Confederate Flag during his campaign against George W. Bush. According to Cohen, the stain became permanent this past week on The View.

Last week, one of the co-hosts, Joy Behar, took McCain to task for some of the ads his campaign has been running. One deliberately mischaracterized what Barack Obama had said about putting lipstick on a pig — an Americanism that McCain himself has used. The other asserted that Obama supported teaching sex education to kindergarteners.

“We know that those two ads are untrue,” Behar said. “They are lies.”

Freeze. Close in on McCain. This was the moment. He has largely been avoiding the press. The Straight Talk Express is now just a brand, an ad slogan like “Home Cooking” or “We Will Not Be Undersold.” Until then, it was possible for McCain to say that he had not really known about the ads, that the formulation “I approve this message” was just boilerplate. But he didn’t.

“Actually, they are not lies,” he said.

Actually, they are.

Cohen says that McCain has “always” conducted himself honorably and held himself up to a different standard which makes his fall all the more disappointing. I would argue that his marrying into Cindy McCain’s beer fortune before the ink was dry on his divorce papers and his subsequent involvement in the Keating 5 scandal (a scandal that is eerily familiar with banks dropping all around us) cast doubt on how committed to honor McCain has been in the past. Self-promotion seems to be his defining characteristic.

But, if Cohen thinks it’s McCain’s moment on the view when he officially jumped the shark, I guess we’re just quibbling over the details. Based on less information than I have today, I supported McCain in 2000. But, for me, he jumped the shark sometime around when he embraced the agents of religious intolerance he castigated in 2000 and or the disastrous Bush tax cuts he was previously against.

Like the United States, he has recently become less than he was, and we need to look forward instead of backward to regain our stature and our promise.

The Obama campaign says that a failed economic philosophy, to which Sen. McCain subscribes, is to blame for the current economic troubles. He doesn’t put it this way, but the shorter version is that unregulated, trickle down, crony capitalism doesn’t work. There is a reason that FDR felt compelled to impose oversight over financial institutions during the New Deal. The cycle of boom & crash that comes with no oversight isn’t a great way to run an economy. Anyway, Obama:

This morning we woke up to some very serious and troubling news from Wall Street.

The situation with Lehman Brothers and other financial institutions is the latest in a wave of crises that are generating enormous uncertainty about the future of our financial markets. This turmoil is a major threat to our economy and its ability to create good-paying jobs and help working Americans pay their bills, save for their future, and make their mortgage payments.

The challenges facing our financial system today are more evidence that too many folks in Washington and on Wall Street weren’t minding the store. Eight years of policies that have shredded consumer protections, loosened oversight and regulation, and encouraged outsized bonuses to CEOs while ignoring middle-class Americans have brought us to the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression.

I certainly don’t fault Senator McCain for these problems, but I do fault the economic philosophy he subscribes to. It’s a philosophy we’ve had for the last eight years – one that says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. It’s a philosophy that says even common-sense regulations are unnecessary and unwise, and one that says we should just stick our heads in the sand and ignore economic problems until they spiral into crises.

Well now, instead of prosperity trickling down, the pain has trickled up – from the struggles of hardworking Americans on Main Street to the largest firms of Wall Street.

This country can’t afford another four years of this failed philosophy. For years, I have consistently called for modernizing the rules of the road to suit a 21st century market – rules that would protect American investors and consumers. And I’ve called for policies that grow our economy and our middle-class together. That is the change I am calling for in this campaign, and that is the change I will bring as President.

McCain continues to insist that the economy is essentially fine. I guess whether it is or isn’t depends on your situation. If, just to pick an example at random, you married into a recession-proof alcohol fortune; the economy probably doesn’t look all that bad.

His lips are moving. Maybe there is going to be some blowback for the McCain campaigns repeated lies. I notice when I write these things, even I feel a reluctance to use the word “lie.” I think there is something buried in our heads that makes us struggle against the notion that other people are intentionally telling us falsehoods. So, in the media reports, you’ll see things like “stretching the truth” and “misrepresented,” but it amounts to the same thing. Facts, as Mr. Colbert noted, have a liberal bias. So, McCain is going to just make stuff up. The “Straight Talk” Express has derailed and been replaced with the Double Talk Express.

Among the whoppers noted by the New York Times:
#McCain falsely claiming that Obama called Palin a pig.
#McCain lying about Obama’s efforts to protect kids from would-be molesters.
#McCain lying about the impact of Obama’s tax plan on the middle class compared to his own.
#McCain lying about “Fact Check’s” fact checking. (Holy recursion, Batman!)
#McCain lying about Palin being against federal earmark spending when she was for it.
#McCain lying about Palin’s opposition to the Bridge to Nowhere when she was a supporter.

The article misses McCain’s lying about Palin selling an Alaskan airplane on eBay for a profit. In fact she advertised the airplane on eBay couldn’t sell it, incurred a hefty fee, and then sold the plane for a loss. But, as the sainted Ronald Reagan once said, “facts are stupid things.”

I’m just waiting for the McCain campaign to explain that McCain can’t tell the truth because he was a P.O.W. for 5 years.

Update TimF at Balloon Juice likens the McCain strategy to Shooting the Moon in Hearts. The McCain campaign is just going to emulate Tommy Flanagan and to hell with anyone who calls bullshit:

This approach is basically the same as shooting the moon in Hearts, a strategy where a player with a terrible hand goes for a perverse win state that requires taking in every negative card in the game. Shooting the moon only works if you take every demerit card take in all but one and you end up with a score so bad that you might as well quit and go home. It’s an all or nothing move.

A few days ago, I posted on the candidates tax plans and how they would impact people at various levels of income. Here is a graphic version (h/t Bloosier Hysteria):

Again, if you’re making more than a quarter of a million dollars per year or if you’re concerned about those who are making that much being treated unfairly in this otherwise fair world, then obviously McCain is a rational choice. Otherwise, Obama might make more sense for your particular situation.

Jamison Foser has an article comparing how the national news media is approaching McCain’s repeated lies and compares that approach to the media’s approach to Al Gore’s alleged lies in 2000. In 2000, Gore would say something that was supposedly false or exaggerated, and the media would go nuts, featuring the allegations of untruth prominently, then asking “Will Gore say anything to get elected?”

When McCain lies, the news media is more apt to repeat the lie several times, ask how Obama will respond, and somewhere toward the end of the story use some tepid, vague euphemism for “lie.”

So, is there a line at which spin transforms beyond the acceptable into flat lying; and will a candidate pay a price for crossing that line?

After eight long years, we’re going to be free of the Bush administration which has been disastrous for the United States. The only question is whether we will also be free of the Bush administration’s policies. Obama represents, Change, Hope, and The Future. McCain represents Stagnation, Fear, and The Past. If you like the way the country has been going the last eight years, vote McCain. If not, vote Obama.

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius was in Terre Haute yesterday stumping for Barack Obama. She stressed that current tax policy mostly benefits the wealthiest 1% (or, as I like to say, those on Barbara Bush’s Christmas card list) and that Obama planned a return to the Clinton tax structure. (Lots of folks like to respond to this with, “Eek! Tax Increases!” If you’re making more than $250,000 per year, then maybe ‘yes,’ but by fixing it to recent history, folks can remember how heavy their tax burden actually was or wasn’t during the Clinton administration when folks were, by and large, doing reasonably well financially; and the country wasn’t running up enormous deficits.)

She also stressed Obama’s plan to focus on the country’s infrastructure. Building up the infrastructure provides good jobs for the present, and, more importantly, lays the foundation for a strong economy in the future. Sebelius said:

The United States is the only nation that doesn’t have a major infrastructure investment project going on, she said, “and not only is [having one] good for our country, it’s good for our future. Moving goods and people and services in and out of market is essential.”

Obama will also be much more focused on repairing frayed alliances and using diplomacy as a major tool of international relations. Look at their styles. Obama is inquisitive, engaging, and persuasive. McCain goes more with the “HULK SMASH!” approach to foreign policy. John “Bomb, Bomb Iran” McCain can’t be counted upon to use diplomacy effectively.

Sebelius concluded:

The race is about two things: restoring the economy and securing allies and the United States’ position in the world, which starts with “getting out of Iraq, a war we should have never been in in the first place,” she said as the audience applauded loudly.

Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, United States’ Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, August 1945:

We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.

Bush Doctrine, September 2002:

The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction— and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.

Sarah Palin, September 2008:

GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?
[Deer in the headlights]
PALIN: In what respect, Charlie? [Fishing for a clue]
GIBSON: The Bush — well, what do you — what do you interpret it to be?
PALIN: His world view.
[Bzzz]

Our progression from right, to wrong, to clueless.

James Fallows has a column in the Atlantic of precisely why this matters. He explains that, if you’re interested in a subject, you will follow along the ebbs and flows of the debate enough to recognize the relevant issues and generally form an opinion — he uses sports and Brett Favre, the Patriots under Belichick (grrrr), and Lance Armstrong as examples. If you don’t care, then you won’t follow it and you won’t have a clue. No big deal for most of us and most sorts of interests. But Palin’s utter blankness was telling.

What Sarah Palin revealed is that she has not been interested enough in world affairs to become minimally conversant with the issues. Many people in our great land might have difficulty defining the “Bush Doctrine” exactly. But not to recognize the name, as obviously was the case for Palin, indicates not a failure of last-minute cramming but a lack of attention to any foreign-policy discussion whatsoever in the last seven years.

Two details in Charles Gibson’s posing of the question were particularly telling. One was the potentially confusing way in which he first asked it. On the page, “the Bush Doctrine” looks different from “the Bush doctrine.” But when hearing the question Palin might not have known whether Gibson was referring to the general sweep of Administration policy — doctrine with small d — or the rationale that connected 9/11 with the need to invade Iraq, the capital-D Doctrine. So initial confusion would be understandable — as if a sports host asked about Favre’s chances and you weren’t sure if he meant previously with the Packers or with the Jets. Once Gibson clarified the question, a person familiar with the issue would have said, “Oh, if we’re talking about the strategy that the President and Condoleezza Rice began laying out in 2002….” There was no such flash of recognition.

The other was Gibson’s own minor mis-statement. American foreign policy has long recognized the concept of preemptive action: if you know somebody is just about to attack you, there’s no debate about the legitimacy of acting first. (This is like “shooting in self-defense.”) The more controversial part of The Bush Doctrine was the idea of preventive war: acting before a threat had fully emerged, on the theory that waiting until it was fully evident would mean acting too late.

Gibson used the word “preemptively” — but if a knowledgeable person had pushed back on that point (“Well, preemption has was what John F. Kennedy had in mind in acting against the imminent threat of Soviet missiles in Cuba”), Gibson would certainly have come back to explain the novelty of the “preventive war” point. Because he knows the issue, a minor mis-choice of words wouldn’t get in the way of his real intent.

Sarah Palin did not know this issue, or any part of it. The view she actually expressed — an endorsement of “preemptive” action — was fine on its own merits. But it is not the stated doctrine of the Bush Administration, it is not the policy her running mate has endorsed, and it is not the concept under which her own son is going off to Iraq.