Two weeks before Cindy McCain swore to NBC's Ann Curry that her "husband is absolutely opposed to any negative campaigning at all," Commentary's Jennifer Rubin spoke to John McCain on a conference call and baited him into describing Barack Obama as --- simultaneously --- the stealth candidate of Hamas, the Sandinistas, and the Weather Underground. Obama responded yesterday on CNN, saying that McCain was "losing his bearings as he pursues this nomination."

How would the campaign Abe Greenwald assures us is the veritable Platonic form ofSenator Tamburlaine the Great: McCain's Potemkin stroll through a Baghdad market in April 2007 allowed terrorists to set up an ambush that killed 21 people...and provided his campaign with a fitting metaphor maturity and masculine wisdom react? Why, with a near-instantaneous hysterical shriek from senior aide Mark Salter, of course. Salter, who seems to have earned his seniority as the campaign's point-man on hysterical shrieking, wants to make it clear just how offensive was Obama's "not particularly clever way of raising John McCain's age as an issue" --- presumably at least slightly more offensive than when Salter called Arianna Huffington "a flake and a poser and an attention-seeking diva" for telling the truth about Salter's boss.

But Salter's real point is to make sure the journalists on his mass-mailing list clearly understand the difference between "legitimate" and illegitimate campaigning. For example, calling your opponent an enemy of the state is a totally "legitimate question...about his judgment and preparedness." However, for Obama to respond to that charge with the charitable interpretation that it's an example of the toll running for president can take on someone's mind (rather than, say, an asshole being true to his nature) is an illegitimate attempt "to delegitimize" the legitimate question of whether Obama is an enemy of the state.

Now, I confess that I can't quite see the conceptual distinction the McCain camp is trying to draw, but then, I didn't learn virtue from a segregationist who taught me to put aside any "reservations about my destiny" of dying an honorable death in battle and going to Valhalla, so I'll have to defer to the expert. Here goes:

So: Unfortunately I still don't get it. Maybe the McCain line between legitimacy and illegitimacy looks incredible to you, too, perhaps even evidence of a candidate having lost his bearings in pursuit of the presidency, but that just goes to show that you and I need to study the Episcopal School Code of Honor a little harder.

The surprising, spectacular, and deeply encouraging failure of populism to move Democratic primary voters is only part of the story of the long overdue demise of the Clinton dynasty in North Carolina and Indiana Tuesday night. Just as decisive, if not moreso, was the near-total collapse of Hillary Clinton's support among African-Americans.

I'm not talking about the familiar collapse of Clinton's black support after Barack Obama proved himself to be a viable mainstream presidential candidate by winning the lily-white Iowa caucuses. A second mass exodus of black voters away from Hillary Clinton made Indiana a statistical push, fattened Obama's margins enough to completely wipe-out Clinton's pyrrhic, pointless victory in Pennsylvania, and broke down the wall of bullshit sustaining the idea that the Democratic primary didn't end in February.

After Obama's win in Iowa, her surrogates' public musings about Obama's possible history of crack dealing, and Bill Clinton's now infamous trashing of the Palmetto State as a consolation prize for the you-know-whats, Hillary Clinton still managed to pull in about one fifth of the black vote in South Carolina. Yet from one Carolina primary to the other, roughly two thirds of Clinton's remaining black support dissolved, only slightly less steep a drop, proportionally, than her fall from this October poll in which she actually led Obama in black support, to the South Carolina exit poll. If she had maintained her South Carolina performance among blacks on Super Tuesday, Potomac Tuesday, Super Tuesday II, and this past tuesday, the net shift would have been more than 500,000 popular votes --- enough to shrink Obama's popular vote lead to near parity, and perhaps take the lead on not terribly extravagant assumptions about non-black liberals who were turned off by the Clinton tactics.

The African-American Vote: Between the CarolinasThe handy chart to the right tells the story graphically. (I've explained my methodology below.) Clinton's share of the black vote declined by about one sixth between South Carolina and Super Tuesday --- a period when national polling showed Obama's support rising across all demographics, and Clinton's falling --- and declined a bit more than another fifth between Super Tuesday and the Potomac primaries at the peak of Obamamania, when (again) all his numbers were improving and hers were going in the other direction. When either economic and demographic factors or Plagiarismgate, Goolsbeegate, and various other pseudo-scandals broke Obama's winning streak in Ohio and Texas, Clinton's black support rose slightly (by about one sixth) --- just like her white and brown support.

Then the Wrightmare struck, a thousand innumerate pundits were launched on a quest to prove that Obama's candidacy was undone before the slightest credible evidence emerged to support their case (they were stunningly wrong, as we now know), and Clinton was only too happy to embrace a wild long-shot electoral strategy of trying to stoke white resentment against a strange, dark, foreign, religiously suspect crypto-Communist who hangs out with sundry terrorists when not spewing elitist contempt for good, decent, ordinary folk. And what happened to Clinton's black support? It plummeted by a catastrophic 44.6 percent between the bookends of the Wrightmare (and nearly a full fifth just between Pennsylvania and Indy/NC), to the point where Hillary Clinton can barely attract half the level of black support of George Allen in his 2006 senate campaign (8.2 percent versus 15). Repeat: barely half the black support of George "Let's welcome 'Macaca' here to the real world of Virginia" Allen. All the while Obama's black support rose.

It's sort of incredible that this needs to be said, but future aspiring presidents, observe the ruins of the House of Clinton and take note: If you want to be the Democratic party's nominee, you will need some black votes, and 0 percent is worse than 5, which is worse than 10, which is worse than 20. So avoid basing your campaign on the argument that your party's most loyal constituents are worthless. They will (eventually) notice.

* * *

How I crunched the numbers: South Carolina is taken as a theoretical starting point, representing the performance among black voters Clinton could have managed even after the emergence of an electable black presidential candidate and her campaign's tactical decision to royally piss off a lot of black people. I track Clinton and Obama's subsequent performance on the four multiple-primary nights since South Carolina --- Super Tuesday, the Potomac Primary, Texas and Ohio, and Indiana and North Carolina --- by calculating the total number of votes cast by African-Americans on each election day and the share of the aggregate African-American vote each candidate received (that way, e.g., Obama's 86 percent in Delaware, 66 percent in Massachusetts, and 61 percent in New York, are weighted to reflected the tiny, medium, and huge populations of each state; for similar reasons as well as the distorting effects of political machines in individual states, I treat single-state primary days as statistical noise and ignore them). Figures are generated from the Real Clear Politics state voting totals and CNN's exit poll estimates of black turnout and vote shares. No caucuses were included since primary and caucus voting pools are incommensurate and too few caucuses had data on black voting to allow for a separate graph of black voting trends in caucus states. Likewise, the New Mexico, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, D.C. primaries had no available data on black voters.

You can download the spreadsheet here and double-check me, or if you're curious and industrious, plug in new values in the C, D, and E columns and track the voting trends of any demographic group.

Our long national Wrightmare is finally over.

With his unexpectedly impressive win in North Carolina and equally unexpected draw in Indiana last night, Barack Obama has successfully withstood a substance-less campaign of defamation from the Clintonites and their allies in the GOP to put to rest any lingering unreasonable doubt over the outcome of the Democratic primary campaign. The Clintonites are still making a show of staying in the race, but they've clearly been sapped of the defiant élan of the last few months, have tellingly retired their character assassinations against Senator Obama, and are effectively resigned to watching their superdelegate and high-level surrogate support leak like a sieve.

Salt Of The Earth: Didn't Woody Guthrie Sing An Ode To Slack-Jawed Idiocy? So what did the zombie campaign do to finally get its brain killed? Somehow, it managed to disprove one of Barnum's laws, and went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. (That is, literally went broke; last month Hillary Clinton loaned her campaign $6.4 million, on top of the at least $5 million she's already lent herself.) Needless to say, this is encouraging news not only for Obama supporters, but all Americans. Here's how it happened.

The Clintonites, whose respect for middle America consists entirely in buying every single crude stereotype about it, simply assumed that the white working class is a) the only part of the electorate that matters and b) monolithically slack-jawed, liver-damaged, unemployed, resentful, paranoid, and gullible. Consequently, they premised their Indiana and North Carolina primary campaigns on the Nigerian 419 gas tax scam, blowing up either OPEC or the moon, the immolation of 72 million innocent Iranians in a nuclear holocaust, leveling the playing field in the housing market by preventing anyone from buying a house for years to come, and generally making sure never to listen to experts just in case they might once in a blue moon be right about their field of expertise. (Under a Hillary Clinton administration, Megan McArdle writes, "no one has to worry about oil or houses, because there won't be any to worry about. That's just the kind of thoughtful, caring politician she is.")

And sure, the Clinton platform may in reality have been what quote-unquote experts describe as "fucking retarded." But as salt of the earth pundits like Joe Scarborough explained, working-class whites just want a bit of help with their bills and aren't interested in lectures from eggheads. And as spokesmen for the last redoubts of Clinton backers further noted, Obama's skepticism about the appreciation working-class people would show to a rich woman offering them a piddling bribe bespeaks a profound elitism and arrogance sure to turn off blue collar voters.

But then a funny thing happened. In Ohio, Obama won 34 percent of the white vote and 42 percent of voters making under $50,000 annually. In Pennsylvania, those numbers were 37 percent and 46 percent, respectively. And in Indiana, 40 percent and 50 percent. In other words, through two months of relentless and increasingly absurd populist pandering and racebaiting, over three primaries in three bordering, demographically similar rust-belt states which one would intuitively expect to be susceptible to the Clinton tactics, Obama consistently if slowly improved his performance among white voters and working-class voters. The Clinton campaign's descent into surrealist performance art bought them less than nothing.

Meanwhile, Obama's share of the college-educated vote, which dipped slightly in Pennsylvania thanks in part to the strength of the Ed Rendell machine, bounced back with a vengeance last night. It seems people who've studied a bit of economics don't take well to being told that up is down; nor, in all likelihood, are they wild about being being called "Gucci-wearing, latte-drinking, self-centered, egotistical people that have damaged our lifestyle" while a presidential candidate looks on smilingly.

So apparently, in 2008, having the audacity to hope that Americans --- even white working-class Americans --- aren't drooling simians can pay off in the end.

Obama Shoots And Misses Jewcers in North Carolina, Indiana, West Virginia, Oregon, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, Montana, and South Dakota still have a chance to cast a vote in the Democratic party's primaries and caucuses. Here are a baker's dozen substantive reasons not to support the senator from Illinois:

1. He has at least rhetorically embraced a phony, cringe-inducing populist critique of free trade glaringly incompatible with his consistent history of economic liberalism (especially since he got religion on markets from Austan Goolsbee).
2. Admirably, he rejects the notion that the economy and society are zero-sum games, in which one man can prosper only if another struggles --- but he has marred this mutualism by scapegoating foreigners.
3. Relatedly, he's been signaling support for corrupt bargains to protect the power of the odious Teamsters Union and free them from legal oversight.
   
4. According to the Congressional Budget Office, his domestic policy proposals would add trillions of dollars to the national debt, perhaps as much as $1.9 trillion.
5. He has caved in to the lowest, cheapest sort of fearmongering by giving credence to the paranoid quack notion that there is a link between autism and vaccination (a cave-in, by the way, that makes the country less safe to the extent that anyone follows up on even candidate Obama's vote-scaring).
6. He has tried to shade away from his admirable position in favor of diplomatic engagement with hostile regimes in Tehran, Pyongyang, Havana, and elsewhere.
7. He has not very deftly fled from an admirable and courageous position in favor of decriminalizing marijuana.
8. He sometimes runs away from an equally admirable position in favor of breaking up the power of the teachers unions with merit pay, charter schools, and experimenting with vouchers.
9. At the Democratic presidential debate in Nevada in January, he had an opportunity to repudiate the pernicious Solomon amendment, which reinforces a policy of weakening our national security by blackmailing schools into supporting state-sanctioned discrimination. He declined the opportunity.
10. His plan to navigate through the subprime mortgage meltdown involves potentially expensive direct subsidies to struggling borrowers. In addition to their expense, such subsidies potentially encourage moral hazard (i.e., in this case, reckless borrowing and lending.)
11. In addition to the subsidies, Obama proposes lifting statutory restrictions on bankruptcy courts imposing binding renegotiations of home mortgages, thereby opening the door to unforseeable risks to investors and potential legal challenges.
12. He supports a "windfall profits tax" on oil companies, which is either an ugly pander to populist resentment of oil companies, or more alarmingly, is a token of a general principle that the government can dictate how much profit an industry is entitled to make.
13. He's largely unwilling to defend Second Amendment rights except in cases where it's uncontroversial.

And these are just reasons that move me. There are plenty of other substantive reasons not to vote for Obama for those who don't share my priors. For example, if your top priority for the next presidential administration is an escalated war with Iraq, a new hot war with any of Iran, Syria, or North Korea, and/or a new cold war with Russia and China, Obama's not your candidate. Ditto if, instead of beginning long overdue improvements in the country's infrastructure and mass transit, you'd prefer the energy policy version of the Nigerian Letter Scam.

On the other hand, if you do share my priors, then despite his imperfections, Obama is better than either of his rivals on nearly all the issues on which he's flawed --- sometimes by a wide margin. On other issues, though his position isn't perfect, it's still vastly better than anything a major party presidential candidate has ever offered.

But see? Cogent, substantive criticism of Obama that doesn't resort to race-baiting or redbaiting, and is at least minimally relevant to justified grounds for voting decisions, isn't that hard after all. I just did it, and I like the guy.

Now, how about you try this exercise out on your candidate? If you're supporting Clinton or McCain (or Nader), I can help. 

Former Jewcer Abe Greenwald is taking a bit of a beating in "Contentions"'s commentsGreasy Kid Stuff section after Andrew Sullivan linked to a Greenwald post extracting armchair political analysis from armchair psychoanalysis of Barack Obama's scandalous substitution of orange juice for coffee at an Indiana diner a few weeks ago. Sez Greenwald:

I realized what the diner incident was: it was childish. The switch from juice to coffee is a rite of adulthood. It’s not that Obama seemed to hold himself above the coffee drinkers. It’s that he seemed to lag behind them. He’s still on fruit juice while the adults are sipping bitter and bracing coffee.

Uh-huh. The tone of the comments ranged from "This is hilariously bad" to "This is the most retarded article I ever sat through to read about politics" to "God you are a vacuous twit."

But that's just being uncharitable. As one of the Commentary stalwarts puts it, "the orange juice...was mainly a device (what writers call the 'hook') to draw the reader’s [sic -- there is more than one Commentary reader] interest." And indeed, Greenwald's argument for Obama's essential immaturity is more substantive than his observation about breakfast beverage preferences. The real point (what writers call the "nut") is to call attention to Obama's proposed increase in the capital gains tax "for purposes," in Obama's words, "of fairness."

QED. That's not fair!, Greenwald notes, is the whinge of a petulant child, not a grown-up senator and would be president.

He's right. What mature adult --- besides John Rawls, and every political theorist of every ideological orientation since Rawls --- has taken the argument that considerations of fairness should constrain policy choices seriously (if only, in the case of grown-up conservatives and libertarians, to disagree)? Why, it's almost as if there's more than one side to the argument over whether to increase, decrease, or maintain the current rate of capital gains taxes and it would behoove opponents of an increase to actually make their case on its merits instead of throwing up a wall of pseudo-psychological bullshit. (My position on capital gains taxes is far from the standard liberal one, incidentally, but you don't get to take my side if you think the reason to oppose a capital gains tax hike is to help Republicans win elections.)

Still, two can play this game. As of 9:48 pm last night, on the website of the flagship magazine of the conservative movement, there were 7 mentions of "health care," 15 mentions of "Iraq," and 230 references to Jeremiah Wright. (Commentary fares marginally better --- a closer to 1:1 ratio of giddy freak show coverage to minimally significant issues, though the deluge of fact-free hackery inundating the divisor of that ratio is a thing to behold.)

What's a fitting description for pundits fixated on preachers and orange juice and flag pins and Weathermen and laughably affecting connections to rural and blue-collar communities, to the near total exclusion of any cogent discussion of two actual wars, potential future wars, skyrocketing debt, swelling generational deficits, and (literally) crumbling infrastructure? "Inane" and "irrelevant" always seemed to me to hit the mark, but --- hat tip to Greenwald for the suggestion --- "infantile" works pretty well too.

Newsflash: Hitler is dead. In fact, today is the 63rd anniversary of his death. Alas, since World War II, Jewish discourse on absolutely every single matter of import to Jews has been crippled by the rhetoric of comparing perceived enemies and threats to Hitler. Whether it's intermarriage, Israel, matrilineal succession (i.e. "who is a Jew?"), whether Jews should retain their separateness, how America should deal with Iran, or whether we should care about Jeremiah Wright's sermons, again and again and again, Nazism and Hitlerism are invoked on every side.

In 1990, a guy named Mike Godwin noticed a similar problem in the online community Usenet. He formulated what's now known as Godwin's Law: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." In the intervening eighteen years, Godwin's Law spread far beyond Usenet to became a bona fide Internet meme. It's now shorthand for any conversation riddled with useless comparisons to Hitler or the Nazis.

It's fine to be sensitive to the historical lessons of WWII, but the tragedy of Godwin's Law is that the Hitler fetish doesn't improve our understanding or insight into any problem. Instead, it diminishes our ability to discuss it. The preoccupation with Hitler and WWII prevents us from honestly considering the opposing side of any debate. We dehumanize our opponent as complicit in genocide, and isn't that very dehumanization and strawmanning and simplifying of people's motives...sort of like Hitler?

In honor of the anniversary of Hitler's death, we looked for some unexpected personalities to Godwin. It's surprisingly easy! More are on their way, so check back often.

Hitlery Rodham Clinton propels herself to power through bogus, distorted, simplified economic pandering targeted at the lowest common denominator of an electorate.

John Sidney Hitler McCain sees politics as a break in between wars and seeks to impose his country's values on the rest of world.

Santa Claus, Enemy of the Jews has at least half of the world’s children under his thumb and saturates the media with his own likeness, ideas, and philosophy.

Baraq Hitler-ssein Osama leads a frightening cult of personality.

Everyone at Columbia is accusing everyone else of Hitlerian tactics in honor of Israel's 60th anniversary.

Anthony Bourdain stereotypes minority groups as "persistent irritants" and "the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit."

Creator of Godwin's law, Mike Godwin, weighs in. 

Some mania is propelling millions of Americans to vote for a man who offers them nothing but cheap, soothing platitudes about some coming golden age of national unity while scapegoating unnamed foreigners and greedy rapacious capitalists for their troubles, and building up a frightening cult of personality around himself. Most of his friends seem to be anti-Semites, and those that aren't Jew-haters seek the violent overthrow of the government and the imposition of a new totalitarian order based on the leadership of some "Worker's Party."

We've seen this movie before, haven't we? Domestic terrorists attempt to set off a revolution in their country's "Second City"; are foiled but not vanquished; and bide their time. People, wake up. First they'll come for the capital gains --- and if you don't speak out because you're not a capital gain, who will speak out for you?

You know who else was for unity?

Some people are awfully concerned that Barack Obama's predecessor in the IllinoisWilliam Ayers: If you know anyone who knows anyone, it's time to reject and denounce yourself. state senate once introduced Obama to ex-Weatherman, lousy bomb maker, and current University of Illinois-Chicago education professor William Ayers at a party in 1995, that Ayers donated a (whopping!) $200 to Obama's state senate campaign in 2001, and Obama and Ayers were colleagues for three years on the Board of Trustees of the Woods Fund, a Chicago urban reform and anti-poverty organization. Maybe, these nuanced and perspicuous thinkers concede, none of these facts in any way imply that Obama harbors secret sympathy for terroristic Communism (though maybe they do!), but they demonstrate at the least an unsettling willingness on Obama's part to associate with scoundrels to advance his career, and represent a betrayal of his avowed commitment to a new kind of politics. Don't they?

Well, since those hot on the scent of the dessicated remnants of a forty-year-old subprime revolutionary front are undoubtedly sincere in their concerns and not just nakedly cynical hacks, they might be interested to learn that the Weather Underground's reach is extended far enough in space and time to poison the New York Times in April 2008. On his Times blog, Hillary Clinton supporter Stanley Fish brazenly confesses his own links to domestic terrorism:

I too have eaten dinner at Bill Ayers’s house (more than once), and have served with him on a committee, and he was one of those who recruited my wife and me at a reception when we were considering positions at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Moreover, I have had Bill and his wife Bernardine Dohrn to my apartment, was a guest lecturer in a course he taught and joined in a (successful) effort to persuade him to stay at UIC and say no to an offer from Harvard.

Shocking stuff, no? Some of us have criticized Fish in the past for wrecking humanities education at several universities and promulgating the notion that philosophy is nothing but bullshit reflections on bullshit, but never in our wildest dreams did we imagine that "Interpreting the Variorum" was actually a subliminal call for the violent overthrow of the US government. Yet there it is in black and white. Rather than initiate a citizens' arrest of Ayers upon sight and seek out the nearest house of worship for absolution, as any upstanding patriotic citizen would have done, and rather even than ship Ayers off to that den of sedition on the Charles River, Fish actually campaigned to keep Ayers at UIC. Sounds like Stanley Fish has some serious explaining to do to the FBI, the editorial staffs of National Review and the Weekly Standard, and the Chappaqua chapter of the Branch Davidians Hillary Clinton campaign, in no particular.

If only that were all to report. But William Ayers' treasonous tentacles of terrible terrorism stretch throughout Chicago and environs. Richard Daley, the doyen of a political dynasty renowned for cosseting pinko commie hippie freaks (especially the violent ones), hired Ayers to direct a citywide education reform program. The Woods Fund Board of Trustees --- which is rumored to meet in a windowless bunker accessible only through a secret portal impeccably camouflaged by the rusty, crumbling tenements of Hyde Park, where a thousand schemes for instigating Red Revolution are diabolically hatched --- can name among its members:

• An endowed professor at DePaul University
  
• The executive director of another Chicago urban development program (we're starting to see what "urban development" is code for, aren't we?)
• One endowed professor at UIllinois-Chicago and another UIC department chair (naturally)
• The media and governmental affairs director of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, a huge international architectural firm
• A manager for BP North America (but of course any company that does so much business in the middle East is likely a seditious fifth column --- now see why the charges that Obama is a furtive Muslim and a godless commie aren't self-evidently contradictory?)
• The Executive Director for Public Affairs of UBS, one of the largest investment banks in the world
• and, The President of Sahara Enterprises, which purports to be a Chicago-based coal mining company (but with a name like that must be an al-Qaeda affiliate)

And get this: Some current Woods Fund Trustees are Republicans, which logically means that there are active Weatherman cells even in God's Own Party. That's still not all. Without any fear of legal repercussions, the Chicago Tribune editorial board nonchalantly admits that "[W]e know Ayers too. And his wife, Bernardine Dohrn. If you know people in Chicago academic circles, chances are you know Ayers and Dohrn." Though of course the traitorous swine won't give detailed lists of names.

Which brings me to my own confession --- though I promise, unlike Fish, the mayor of Chicago, and the CT editorial board, I treat this matter with the gravity it deserves. The full, shocking size and scope of the Weather Underground's fifth column within the academic, business, political, and journalistic institutions of Chicago impels me to go public with something weighing on my conscience. I once had lunch with Chesa Boudin, whom William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn took in as an infant and raised as their own son when his parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, were given life sentences in prison for their role as accessories in the Brinks Robbery. Granted, once having a brief meal with William Ayers' adoptive son says less about my character than, say being introduced to Ayers himself at a party, but that's hardly an excuse. Chesa Boudin neither rejects nor denounces William Ayers, and what's worse, he served on the staff of Hugo Chavez. Clearly the only thing for me to do is turn myself in to the FBI.

Unless, that is, there is a more parsimonious explanation of the fact that William Ayers' acquaintances constitute an ersatz Who's Who in Chicago. And come to think of it, there just might be.

Sometimes, when someone does something terrible and escapes criminal sanction, civilized society ostracizes that person, and has good justification for doing so. Like O.J. Simpson and Michael Skakel. Other times, despite having justification for ostracism, society elects by convention to overlook some individual's misdeeds. Like William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. Also like Oliver North, whose felony convictions were overturned thanks to limited Congressional immunity, and instead of being shunned by all good folk, was able to pivot to a Republican nomination for election to the Senate in 1994, and then a lucrative career as a right-wing pundit and fundraiser. And like Elliot Abrams, another Iran-contra crook, who escaped incarceration through plea-bargaining and then a pardon from President George H.W. Bush, only to be appointed to the National Security Council by President George W. Bush. Come to think of it, George W. Bush didn't hesitate to staff his administration by means of an Iran-Contra reunion tour.

Then there's Henry Kissinger, who successfully parleyed his responsibility "for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture" (as Christopher Hitchens aptly put it), into a permanent position as a darling of the talk show circuit, a confidant of Charlie Rose and Ted Koppel, as many reserved column inches in as many prominent American newspapers as he would like, and an informal advisory role to every president since he left government --- sort of a German-Jewish secular war criminal Billy Graham. There's also Billy Graham, whose anti-Semitic ramblings with Richard Nixon never for a moment jeopardized his quasi-official job as Oval Office chaplain.

In like fashion, there's the Dixiecrat remnant faction of the Republican party. Though most of the racist scumbags have by now slipped off the moral coil, it wasn't long ago that Republican Congressional majorities were made possible by the support of some of the most virulent segregationists in American history --- not the ideological heirs of segregation, but the segregationists themselves --- who are personally culpable not only for extending the shelf-life of a horrific system of state-sanctioned persecution, but also, through their perversions of the judicial system, for enabling far-flung campaigns of racist murder and domestic terrorism. (Compare that to the piddling tally of the Weather Underground.) Strom Thurmond is of course the most prominent example, and also an instructive one. It was simply too awful for many political and media elites to acknowledge the presence in the US Senate of an unrepentant champion of Jim Crow, so they simply pretended that Thurmond had repented. Trent Lott eventually lost his Senate leadership position for bumblingly praising segregation in a botched effort to pay tribute to Thurmond, thereby reminding the larger political culture of the gruesomeness of its willful blindspot on Thurmond, but the upshot is that Lott never would have gotten into any trouble if all he had done was attend Strom Thurmond's birthday dinner without giving any speech.

Needless to say, proving a damning relationship between Thurmond and any recent Republican senator, on the standards of evidence the anti-Obama McCarthyite mania has enshrined, is simple enough a kindergartner could do it; and also so transparently idiotic a kindergartner could call bullshit on it. 

Let's not forget the more recently-minted criminals of the Bush administration. We could start with Lewis Libby, convicted of felony perjury, two separate counts of felony obstruction of justice, and felony provision of false statements to federal investigators. But, then, the very same crowd that thinks Barack Obama owes the American people an explanation of his relationship with William Ayers will be quick to remind us that Libby was the victim of a hack partisan (Republican) inquisitor, and besides, it's okay to break laws in the name of a higher principle just in case that higher principle is neoconservative. So never mind Libby.

The evidence is clear and decisive that Jay Bybee, William Haynes, David Addington, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, and John Yoo (to mention only a few names) are all complicit in a wave of --- what would Hitchens call it? --- war crimes, crimes against humanity, and offenses against common and customary and international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture. Despite that, or perhaps partly because of it, they can shortly expect to settle down to sinecures at conservative foundations and thinktanks, or assume spots on investment banks' boards of directors, or move on to jobs in the next Republican administration. They'll be celebrated guests on talk shows, commissioned by the New York Times and Washington Post to savage President Obama's resolution of the Iraq War (here's hoping), and in general treated by the connected set of Washington, D.C. and beyond just as if they were venerable statesmen rather than war criminals. Unless one of them is foolish enough to attend a dinner party at Baltasar Garzon's house, none of them will ever experience a minute of the life sentences they deserve.

And current and future Republican politicians will be (or already have been) introduced to them at parties, receive $200 or more campaign donations from them (or already have), and serve on boards of charitable trusts and business ventures with them (or already do). Would anyone care to set an over/under on how long it takes, in minutes, to establish connections, within, say, three degrees of separation or less, between John McCain and every living prominent Republican current or former politician or cabinet official whose offenses against the law and common decency merit permanent ostracism from civilized company? What do such connections tell us about John McCain's sympathy for (say) the Bush administration's project of whiting out various amendments to the Constitution? Unless he endorses such projects himself, they tell us nothing, nor do they tell us anything about his character, nor do they "raise legitimate questions" (because the questions are illegitimate), nor do they warrant McCarthyite public spectacles because "these issues are on the minds of voters."

The phenomenon of people doing loathsome things, never expressing remorse, and being rehabilitated and reincorporated in polite society is pervasive and inescapable. If it implicates anyone, it implicates everyone. Private individual decisions to shun such people may be praiseworthy under some circumstances, and amount to empty ineffectual posturing in others, but no one --- not Barack Obama, not anyone else --- has an individual obligation to brand anyone with a scarlet letter, make a scene at a party, or turn down perfectly respectable business or charitable enterprises.

This election year, the US is engaged in two costly and arguably counterproductive foreign occupations and a quasi-war against assorted non-state actors, a recession is looming if not already underway, our budget deficit continually balloons to (even inflation-adjusted) staggering record highs, and the long-term solvency of our major social welfare programs is soon to face extreme demographic pressures. Against that backdrop, arguing even implicitly that voters should make their decisions on the basis of friendships and associations of candidates that have no bearing whatsoever on their substantive views, agenda, or approach to governance is a rather straightforward confession of intellectual bankruptcy. It's time for two-bit inquisitors with warped moral faculties and priorities to shut the fuck up.

UPDATE: And there you have it: Hillary Clinton's new top strategist, Geoff Garin, called for the violent overthrow of the US government...35 years ago, when he was in college. That doesn't mean he's a bad person (it makes him a typical wannabe proletarian Harvard student in 1973), it doesn't mean Hillary Clinton's a bad person, and it doesn't mean there is any more or less reason to vote for Hillary Clinton now than before this came out; but it does mean a bunch of McCarthyite hacks need to find something to gag on next time they want to open their mouths.

Reductio creep in action: Last week, Barack Obama shrugged off the freak showNas, A Scary Black Man: Just look at him, all uppity and whatnot, planning God knows what debate in Philadelphia with a panache unprecedented in modern electoral history, proving that yes we can elect a president who isn't hopelessly out of touch with contemporary culture. Little did I know, when I wondered how long it would take some half-wit to suggest that Obama's reference to Jay-Z was a gang sign, that a half-wit with a reasonably large platform had already uncovered the disturbing truth about Obama's scandalous connection to the Roc-A-Fella Dynasty.

In a piece aptly entitled "Obama's Other Jeremiah Wrights," Evan Gahr of Human Events rides Paul Revere-like into small town America to warn that Obama's fifth column includes not only Jeremiah Wright, but equally troublingly, Jay-Z, will.i.am, Ludacris, Q-tip, Russell Simmons, Nas, and "9/11 conspiracy theorist" Mos Def. Obama's "complicity with rappers" --- another impressively insightful word choice --- goes all the way "back to at least 2006." Only egregious liberal media bias can explain why these shocking facts haven't come to light until now. The piece does not report, though doubtless a future installment of Human Events will, about the meetings Obama has held with these "thugs" to discuss their secret plans to seduce your daughter. But Gahr does helpfully put the matter in its appropriate context when he closes with the observation that David Dinkins had the courage to denounce Louis Farrakhan, and Obama should therefore denounce the Farrakhans in his midst as well.

I'd like to quibble with Gahr, but his major point is absolutely right: The questions Mos Def and Nas raise about Obama's character are every bit as significant and informative as the questions Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan raise about his character. And in general, there is something almost admirable about the volume of surplus work the guilt-by-black-association crowd is willing to do composing interminable ponderings about how they were quite ready to vote for a nice, clean, articulate black man until all his scary black friends turned up --- thousands upon thousands of words written, and who knows how many man-hours of labor wasted, all to avoid saying, more starkly but also more accurately: "People! Are you crazy? Don't vote for a nigger!"

Sign seen in Philadelphia I had a meeting this morning and I was running late. I realized I had missed the bus and there were no cabs to be found. I started walking towards Center City all while hoping I’d miraculously run into a lost cabbie. Didn’t happen. I stopped at a busy intersection, pulled out a five dollar bill and started approaching cars.

“Five bucks if you drop me at Market Street.”

After suffering glares from a couple of old people and making a couple of frightened girls zoom off – I shouldn’t have had my hood up – I found an African-American guy in an Explorer, listening to Ne-Yo, pulled up and let me in.

“I’m in a good mood today,” he said.

I got in. After a brief lull in conversation I reminded him that later in the day ObamaRemember, It's The City Of *Brother*ly Love: Apparently Hillary Clinton's ovaries, as well as her tactics, are costing her votes in Philadelphia would be holding a major rally near the Liberty Bell.

“You gonna vote?” I asked.

“Hell yeah,” he said.

“Who for?”

“Obama!”

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t trust a woman to be President,” he said.

I was shocked. Here was a black guy not voting for Obama because the junior senator references Jay-Z in his speeches.

That was sarcasm, by the way.

I egged him in a little bit and found that he didn’t particularly have a reason for supporting Obama aside from the fact that Hillary was a woman.

“Well, also because that’s what my Church wants me to vote,” he said.

I probably should have stopped and inquired whether it was his Church that was feeding him the line about Hillary’s gender. But I had reached my stop. I paid him and scampered off.

(Yes, I did make my meeting on time).

***

I found my morning encounter interesting because of another experience involving Obama and Hillary.

One night, three of us – me, one Princeton graduated white guy in Big Pharma, and a middle class Indian lawyer – got in a cab being driven by an African immigrant. He heard us talking about politics and asked us who we were voting for.

“I’m leaning towards Obama,” I said.

My Indian friend – a former Republican – said he was totally for Obama, while the white guy said that he would support anyone who didn’t raise his taxes.

“So two Obama and one McCain?” the cabbie confirmed. “Why not Hillary?”

Before I could answer, he answered his own question.

“I tell you why, man! She lies about every policy. Voted for war, says she’s against it. Says she’s for little guy, is in bed with corporations.”

“So you’ll vote for Obama, then?” I asked.

“No man, I can’t vote,” he replied. He wasn’t yet a citizen. However, he assured the three of us that every passenger he picked up he would try to convert them away from Hillary.

“Even McCain is better than her,” said the cabbie who can’tvote.

***

A few days earlier, I was taking a trip out to the sub-urbs to see one of my friends. I went to 30^th Street train station and waited for my train to arrive. In the meantime, I saw a couple of Obama activists approaching the travelers. To pass the time, my friend and I went up to them.

“Pretend to be a Hillary supporter,” I told him.

He went up (naturally) to the cute girl and started peppering her with questions about Obama as well as dropping positive commentary about Hillary.

She argued with him fervently. Ultimately, though, her argument could be summed up in one line: “How can you trust Hillary? She’s just not trust-worthy.”

Not wanting to be left out of talking to the cute girl I chimed in: “That’s an interesting accent you got there. Where are you from?”

“Oxford University,” she said. “I’m a visiting student at Penn.”

When the train arrived, we walked away. As we left, the girl who couldn’t vote in the elections reminded us again that Hillary was untrustworthy.

***
Hillary hate is pretty high in Philadelphia. It’s not just the Churches, and the cabbies, and the rich Penn kids. It also infects the right-wing anti-abortion activists.

When I was returning from the aforementioned meeting earlier I got on a bus that went past the historic City Hall.

At a distance, hanging between two light-poles, right next to the Masonic Temple, were two tremendous signs.

The letters were in black, except for the word ‘Jezebel’, in parentheses.

“HILLARY (Jezebel) KILLS BABIES” read the first sign. The second one featured a gruesome picture of a dismembered fetus.

After I pushed down the bile in my throat, I asked myself why the sign didn’t say anything about Obama. After all, he, like Hillary, is also pro-Choice.

***

It was at that point that the germs for this article began coming to my head. It appeared that no one had particular reasons for their Obamamania other than the fact that they hated Hillary.

I also begin asking myself. If Obama’s support in Philadelphia – a relatively well-educated and progressive city – is premised on such irrationality, then can’t it be the case that in other parts of the country, support for Hillary or McCain or even Bush, is also premised on irrationality and closed-mindedness? If so, what does it really say about politics in America? Is it really the case that our leaders are bankrupt or is it that our leaders are a reflection of ourselves; even, dare I say, Obama? 

People enduring severe economic stress “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them,” Barack Obama privately told a group of fundraisers in San Francisco. For those who have been on the moon for the past few days, you should know that Hilary Clinton responded that Obama was “elitist, out of touch and, frankly, patronizing.”

That word, frankly, is what poker players call her tell. When she says it, you know she is about to bluff: advance a charge that would be just plausible if we didn’t know her, a charge she is counting on 24-hour-cable-coiffed-heads to play dumb about for excitement’s sake. Oh, by the way, John McCain just agreed with her: Obama is elitist. And now Maureen Dowd.

I can’t really imagine a time attacks like this wouldn’t annoy me. If you are worldly, erudite, discriminating, articulate, etc., then you presumably have rare gifts. But since these are rare, and worthy, then you must be part of an elite. So, na, na, how can you be elite without being elitist?

As it happens, though, I just finished reading Dreams From My Father, the younger Obama’s extraordinary memoir, and these particular attacks strike me as foolish and brazen in way that borders on dangerous. Do we really --- proudly --- credit politicians this much for their ability to manipulate us? Do we really want --- as Richard Gere twinkled at Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman” --- a “professional”?

Obama and Orwell

I picked the book up in an airport out of curiosity; I was a strong supporter anyway and thought I might learn a thing or two about his past. I did not expect to be utterly absorbed by the third page, by his story and, even more important, his style. Imagine Orwell combining his autobiographical essay about his public school, “Such, Such, Were The Days,” and his reflections on British imperialism “Shooting an Elephant,” with The Road To Wigan Pier. Imagine Orwell having the religious humility to look back without rancor.

So now imagine that Orwell ran for Parliament in a working-class district after the war, and gave an interview in which he said that poor people sometimes cling to religious dogmas or xenophobia to try to make sense of their world. Imagine his Tory opponent --- knowing full well that few people in the working-class actually read essays or books --- suggested that Orwell, that author, was elitist. Imagine that a columnist for (of all places) the Times of London picked up the story and accused Orwell of being --- how did Dowd put it? --- less a candidate than an anthropologist.

I guess the idea is that if you are brilliant enough to write, and write movingly, about your years in poverty, your gratitude for the transcendent life of the mind, your decision to organize against despair with compassion and mentoring, your years defending people downtrodden by forces they cannot control, your loved ones in far-flung parts of the world, pitting their magic against alcohol --- indeed, if you can write anything without a ghostwriter --- then you must think you are smarter than ordinary people, and must therefore be “out of touch.” (On the other hand, if you are accustomed to privilege, and educated to triangulation, so that you know how to buy a ghost writer who'll make you appear a populist, then, by definition, you don’t think you’re so smart, and must therefore be close to ordinary people.)

So here is an anthropological question for you. What do you say about the future of a democracy that buys this stuff?

Geoff "Don't Call Me 'Jeff'" Davis (R - KY) Part of the story of Barack Obama's meteoric rise from the Illinois state senate four years ago to the precipice of the White House today is that there has been perhaps no one in recent American political history as fortunate in his draw of opponents. (Bill Clinton was nearly, but not quite as lucky.)

When the campaign for the Democratic nomination for the 2004 senate election began, Obama trailed Blair Hull, a deep-pocketed financier, by a wide margin. Then the Chicago Tribune opened up Hull's divorce files and it turned out that Hull's ex-wife had accused him of assault. Hull was finished. As the campaign tilted toward the general election, Obama faced off against the seemingly formidable Republican Jack Ryan, a partner at Goldman Sachs who made several hundred million dollars on his firm's IPO and was prepared to invest it in his run for the senate. Then the Chicago Tribune opened up Ryan's divorce files and discovered that Ryan's ex-wife, Seven of Nine, had accused him of taking her to sex clubs and trying to impress her into swinging and exhibitionism. So much for Ryan. Desperate, the Illinois GOP recruited Alan Keyes. Obama won the largest victory in Illinois senatorial election history.

Seven of Nine aka Jeri Ryan A similar pattern has played out this year, as Hillary Clinton, who should have won the Democratic nomination in a walkover, ran the worst primary campaign since primaries began to count, and in particular heeded Mark Penn's brilliant "insult 40 states" strategy. So much for Clinton.

At every crucial juncture in his career when Obama appears to be on the brink of disaster, one of his opponents manages to overplay a winning hand recklessly, or else disaster befalls Obama's opponent instead. Case in point: After Obama's clumsy effort to connect with rural Pennsylvanians blew up in his face, Republican Kentucky Congressman Geoffrey Davis decided to make it clear that "that boy's finger does not need to be on the button."

Now there is, to be sure, a relatively innocent interpretation of Davis's remark, to the effect that Davis was merely talking in a jocular slang. But on any of the non-innocent interpretations, Davis was making use of a genteel way of calling Obama a nigger. Would anyone care to bet on what dominates political headlines for the next few news cycles? After all, a man who voluntarily goes by "Geoff Davis" isn't really begging for interpretive charity on racial issues.

The corner of Church and State: Neither are one-way streetsSunday night, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton showed up at Messiah College’s Compassion Forum to talk about faith in political life. Good for them. Just wish it had been Hebrew College.

As a persecuted, outnumbered, and very intelligent people of faith, we Jews have been staunch supporters of the separation of church and state. After all, when you make up just over 2% of the population of a country, you don’t want presidential politics to turn into a “most popular faith” contest. We’d be sitting on the sidelines with the Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus and wild Wicca folks, watching the Christian evangelicals, mainline Protestants and Catholics duke it out for religion numero uno.

As a result, Jews have lived split lives, following a kind of self-made kashrut in which politics and faith may never mix. Jews have become well-known for our left-wing political activism, from the labor movement of the 1920 and 30s to the hippie/peace movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the pro-peace and anti-globalization movements today. Yet, with just a few exceptions, the political Jews have been secular Jews, using tikkun olam as a substitute for religion instead of as an expression of it.

The result has been a damaging split within the Jewish community. On the one side, the progressive, pink, secular Jews; on the other side, the insular, black-hatted, religious Jews. Religion and politics grew so far apart that many of us felt we had to be closeted to cross the divide—Orthodox Jews had to pretend to being apolitical; progressive Jews had to pretend to be secular.

Both had to disregard a difficult little fact—namely, that Jewish law is all about mixing politics and faith. Torah teaches us to feed the poor and house the homeless, care for the sick and instruct our children, steward the earth and, in all cases and everywhere, protest wrongs. We even have cool terms for these obligations: tzedakah, give charity; bikkur cholim, care for the sick; pikuakh nefesh, save human life; ba’al tashchit, do not waste the earth’s resources; tikkun ha’olam, repair the world.

These obligations come to us as essential elements of our faith tradition. They are not simply examples of good ethical practices, nor are they limited to caring for our immediate family, community or faith group. As Ruth Messinger and Aaron Dorfman remind us in Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice, the Talmud tells us that we have a broader universe of obligation than just caring for our own:

Our Rabbis taught: We sustain the non-Jewish poor with the Jewish poor, visit the non-Jewish sick with the Jewish sick, and bury the non-Jewish dead with the Jewish dead, for the sake of peace. [Gittin 61a; and see Rambam’s gloss, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings, 10:12] In the modern world, political action is the most effective way to fulfill these ethical obligations. Social Security and Medicare, a national health care plan (may it be so) and public schooling, global aid and a military that can intervene to right wrongs—these are all part of our political system. In short, Torah itself tells us that politics and religion cannot be separated.

How do we reconcile a faith tradition that tells us to mix politics and religion with a democratic and pragmatic belief that politics and religion must be kept separate? Barack Obama framed the problem, and offered a solution, when he suggested that asking whether we can have politics and religion together is a false question. The real question is to ask, how do they belong together. And for that, Obama had an intriguing answer:

All of us come to the public square with our values and ideals and our ethics—what we believe. And people of religious faith have the same right to come to that public square with the values and ideals that are rooted in their faith, and they have the right to describe them in religious terms….

There is a fundamental difference between talking about values, about the why behind our ideas and actions, and talking about programs and positions, the what of political life. For example, a Catholic should rightly be able to talk about why even the potentiality of life is sacred—but that is very different from saying that all Americans should be against abortion. As Jews, we should be able to talk about the holiness inherent in our choices about what we eat—but that is very different from saying that all Americans should take up kashrut.

Indeed, when we understand that faith gives us political values, we will find ourselves back in that comfort zone for Jews—flourishing debate. Torah tells us that we must intervene to right wrongs—but what does that mean, precisely? For example, does the value of pikuakh nefesh, protecting a life, mean we must protest the Iraq war and withdraw our forces (the good left answer) or (as John McCain insists) bring it to the best possible conclusion, however long that takes? Does caring for the sick mean a national health care plan or health care tax credits? Values don’t necessarily lead to particular positions.

It’s time for Jews to stop worrying so much about dividing faith from politics. We should be spending our energy getting into the debate, offering up our own ideas about how Jewish values would lead to a better politics.

What, me inexperienced?: Obama loves fiscal policy like a fat kid loves cakeOne narrative has remained remarkably consistent throughout this election cycle: Hillary the cold, detail-oriented policy wonk versus Obama the passionate dreamer with only vague ideas about governing. "Perspiration versus inspiration"–it seems like a fairly straightforward choice.

The problem is that there’s not a shred of truth to the claim that Barack Obama is a policy lightweight. All the evidence suggests that Obama is every bit the policy wonk that Clinton is, if not more so. Let’s begin with the fact that Obama was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School for 12 years, teaching policy-relevant courses, and was so successful that he was invited to join the full-time tenure-track faculty. While in the Illinois State Senate, Obama spearheaded several complex initiatives, most notably an expansive campaign finance reform bill that put Illinois at the forefront of campaign finance disclosure.

In the U.S. Senate, Obama has taken on some relatively low-profile but highly complicated and important issues, especially nuclear non-proliferation. When he began his presidential campaign, Obama brought on as one of his chief economic advisers Austan Goolsbee, a widely respected U. Chicago economist who is at the cutting edge of behavioral economics. Most candidates, including Hillary Clinton, hire old Washington (non-economist) political hands to advise them on economics, yet Obama chose a leading academic instead.

Does Clinton even know what BitTorrent is?: Obama's the candidate who understands net neutrality issuesAnd on the cluster of issues surrounding net neutrality and lowered barriers to information technology in general, Obama is the only presidential candidate who has even a passing familiarity with the range of policy choices and their relevance to the future of an increasingly information-based economy. Moreover, Obama takes a strongly pro-neutrality position that is in line with the consensus among the experts on the issue, whereas Clinton mostly just avoids the issue.

Despite the fact that there is zero evidence in its favor, the zombie meme that Obama offers no policy specifics persists. With any luck, his economic address last week will finally put to rest any doubts about Obama’s command of domestic issues.

From the beginning of the speech,it is clear that Obama thinks big. He traces America’s economic history from the days of Hamilton and Jefferson all the way to today, laying out a coherent, expansive narrative about American prosperity. He offers a vision of economic mutualism that breaks sharply from the identity-group antagonisms previous Democrats and Republicans have stoked, concluding that “the fundamental truth is that each American does better when all Americans do better; that the well-being of American business, its capital markets… and the American people are aligned.”

Obama addresses today’s economic crisis by explaining how lobbyist-induced governmental irresponsibility has frayed the bonds between Wall Street and Main Street, resulting in uneven prosperity and extreme risk-taking that is dangerous for both bankers and workers. He wants to realign the incentives so that “both high level executives and employees better serve the interests of shareholders.”

Obama deftly avoids the trap of acquiescing to the false choice between “an oppressive government-run economy and a chaotic, unforgiving capitalism,” and many of his specific policies spring from this previously excluded middle. For example, he is co-sponsoring Sen. Chris Dodd's legislation creating a new FHA housing security program that will provide incentives for lenders to buy or refinance existing mortgages, preventing foreclosures by prodding both borrowers and lenders to share the sacrifices within a market setting (note: in fairness, Clinton supports the bill as well, though she is not a sponsor). He also proposes a $10 billion foreclosure prevention fund aimed exclusively at defrauded homeowners, among other initiatives that try to solve the crisis without simply handing out government money in every direction. And looking to the future, Obama hopes to prevent problems in the housing market by introducing an easily understandable home-score system for borrowers and giving stiffer penalties to fraudulent lenders.

Don't worry, I'll just borrow against my luxury condo: The housing bubble didn't develop in a vaccuum But he doesn't just focus on the housing market. Obama correctly sees the housing bubble and subsequent bust as part of a larger story of financial deregulation in the last few decades that has ratcheted up the level of risk while lowering the level of oversight, resulting in wildly irresponsible financial practices. His goal is to bring financial institutions back into a regulatory framework, instilling trust and accountability back into the markets with the minimum regulatory touch needed get the job done.

To do so, Obama proposes a series of specific reforms that include liquidity and capital requirements on any institution for which the Fed acts as lender of last resort (as it essentially did with Bear Stearns), increased oversight of ratings agencies, increased transparency and disclosure requirements for financial institutions, a streamlined regulatory structure to reduce overlapping agencies, and a financial market oversight commission to look for crises on the economic horizon. He concludes by tying back into his stirring historical narrative, inspiring Americans to follow in the footsteps of the founding fathers by taking the path of shared prosperity.

If last week's speech proved anything, it's that Obama can deliver both inspirational rhetoric and well-reasoned policies. In contrast, Clinton’s economic speech last week was narrowly focused on the current housing crisis, failing to seriously address its connection to the impending recession or propose measures to prevent future problems. So much for "perspiration versus inspiration."

Barack Atah Adonai: Obama and his haloI bet Radar’s “Jesus or Obama” quiz is quickly going to become the most-linked piece on their site. Why did no one think of this before?

You can take it here. Personally, I got totally pwned – 3/10 points – but I think that’s because I don’t know anything about Jesus.