watching ohio

 

Election protection in Ohio (and America) isn’t over

Election Integrity

by Harvey Wasserman | November 18, 2008 – 9:21am

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman

As the sun sets on Bush 2, it is clear that a very thin line of electoral protection preserved Barack Obama’s victory in Ohio–and the nation.

And it’s no accident the vote count battle for a Columbus-area Congressional seat still rages.

The GOP’s 2008 electoral strategy again emphasized massive voter disenfranchisement and rigging the electronic vote count. The twin tactics very nearly gave Ohio to McCain/Palin, and threatened to set precedents capable of winning them the national election.

Prior to the 2004 vote, Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell stripped some 308,000 Ohio citizens from the registration rolls in heavily Democratic districts. This mass disenfranchisement alone may have accounted for the 118,000-plus official margin that gave George W. Bush a second term in the White House.

After the 2004 vote, Blackwell disenfranchised another 170,000 voters in heavily Democratic Franklin County (Columbus).

But in 2006, Democrat Jennifer Brunner was elected to replace Blackwell. Ironically, the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal civil rights lawsuit filed against Blackwell over 2004 election irregularities has carried over, making Brunner the defendant (we are plaintiff and defendant in that suit). As a result, negotiations between Brunner and election protection attorneys have been on-going since she took office.

In the lead-up to the 2008 elections, the GOP tried yet another massive voter purge. Through the “caging” technique of sending unsolicited “do not forward” junk mail, GOP operatives obtained by returned mail the names of some 600,000 registered Ohio voters. Some were serving in Iraq. Also, the GOP once again fought to purge voters for “inactivity” as they sought to eliminate voters who hadn’t voted in four-years as opposed to eight, even if they voted in state and local eletions..

The GOP demanded the right to disenfranchise these voters. But Brunner directed that each was entitled to notice and an individual in-person hearing.

As Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., have reported, the GOP used similar caging throughout the US, aimed at millions of likely Democratic voters.

The GOP also went after 200,000 new Ohio voters whose registrations showed minor discrepancies. Included were variations in social security and drivers’ license numbers, or changes in middle names, nicknames and addresses.

But Brunner fought to protect these names from GOP challenge, and was upheld by the US Supreme Court, who refused to hear the GOP case prior to the election.

Based on projected demographic and voter turnout statistics, the elimination of these four-fifths of a million voters (some 5.4 million votes were counted in Ohio 2008) could have shifted a 200,000-vote victory for Obama to a 40,000-vote triumph for McCain. This projection is based on a conservative estimate that 80% of these targeted voters vote Democratic and 50% would have turned out to vote.

Partly in response to pressure from election protection activists, Brunner also facilitated early and absentee voting. Polling stations opened by September 30 throughout the state. Despite GOP efforts, a full week was available to those who wished to register and vote at the same time. As least 25% of Ohio’s voters cast their ballots prior to Election Day. By most accounts these votes went overwhelmingly for Obama. The Columbus Dispatch reported that Democrats outvoted Republicans 12-1 in early voting.

Brunner also tried to make paper ballots available to all voters who wanted them. Under often dubious financial arrangements with a direct conflict of interest as a stockholder, Blackwell installed Diebold electronic voting machines designed to account for as many as half Ohio’s 2008 votes.

But the GOP-controlled legislature manipulated the finances behind the push for paper ballots. Ohio’s 88 counties eventually provided enough of them for at least 25% of the voters. But so many voted early that reports now indicate there were ultimately enough paper ballots at the Election Day polling stations for nearly all who wanted them.

Other GOP attempts at disenfranchisement also fell flat. When the Republican sheriff of Greene County attempted to prosecute 304 students (many of them African-American) for “voter fraud” he ignited a massive public outcry. At issue was the common confusion over whether a student will vote at home or at college. Under widespread attack, the sheriff backed off. But students at public universities and liberal arts colleges throughout the rest of the state reported GOP harassment.

Despite widespread attempts to avoid them, there were 186,000 provisional ballots cast in Ohio 2008, some 40,000 more than the 141,000 cast in 2004 (16,000 of which have never been counted). Independent observers reported on-going confusion about the use of provisional ballots, largely attributed to poor pollworker training.

A federal database used to check driver’s license information went down for nearly three hours on Election Day due to what the Ohio Department of Public Safety said was “a large fiber-optic cable being cut in Texas.”

Despite an increase of 319,000 registered Ohio voters in 2008 over 2004, the official turnout was actually lower. Barack Obama received 22,000 fewer votes than John Kerry. John McCain got 317,000 fewer than Bush. Election protection experts attribute this to a selective GOP padding of the 2004 vote count, especially in three heavily Republican southwestern counties where irregularities and improbabilities abounded.

An observer in Miami County reported that a Republican election director illegally forced recently-moved citizens to vote provisionally. In Franklin County, pollbooks wrongly identified 35,000 voters as provisional. Four black voters in Fairfield County reported being purged despite stable long-term residencies. The Republican-connected company Triad, infamous for its secretive work on central tabulators in 2004, emerged in the majority of Ohio counties as the keeper of electronic pollbooks for the boards of elections.

While these and other irregularities bruised the election, there were far fewer than reported in 2004. The presence of hundreds of well-trained and equipped election protection volunteers throughout the state seem to have staved off any GOP attempt to repeat the massive disenfranchisement that gave the 2004 Ohio vote count to George W. Bush. Key Ohio polling stations were graced with independent election observers appointed by the Green Party. Independent video-the-vote teams, nonpartisan election observers, and Obama supporters were placed outside the polls documenting all that happened. With an apparently workable distribution of voting machines and sufficient paper ballots as a backup (along with a clear sunny day) the horrors of long lines in Ohio’s 2004 election were avoided in 2008.

The Ohio vote count also seems to have been successfully protected. In Licking County, a voter reported that his paper ballot was put in a bag without an envelope. In Youngstown, Joyce Stewart reports being given a paper ballot that had no place to choose a president.

E-voting machines in three Columbus precincts double-counted votes. In heavily Democratic Lucas County, four out of eight e-voting machines in precinct 20, recorded no votes for president, while recording far higher vote counts for such minor offices as county coroner.

The poll judge in Columbus precinct 25G tried to have legitimate exit pollers arrested. In Trumbull County, Warner Lange observed that “all of the votes cast using a paper ballot between the hours of 6:30am and 8:15 am are invalid because none of the voters were asked, as required, to sign the pollbook.”

In Hamilton and Franklin Counties (Cincinnati and Columbus) early and absentee ballots were not counted on Election Night, as originally planned. It took three hours after the polls closed for Union County election officials to get their ballots scanned. Terry Grimm reported that “everything was wrong” coming from the Summit County town of Barberton, causing a delayed tabulation.

Kevin Egler in Portage County reported that after 2800 votes were scanned on election night, a “corrupted card signal” came out, forcing election officials to start the vote count over.

Ultimately, despite Brunner’s attempts to get rid of them, hundreds of thousands of votes were again cast and counted on electronic voting machines with no paper trail and no way to do a reliable recount.

But missing this time was an electronic theft apparatus under the control of Blackwell and Karl Rove.

On Election Night 2004, Blackwell e-mailed Ohio’s electronic vote count to a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee that also housed the servers for the Republican National Committee. The tally “miraculously” shifted from Kerry to Bush between 12:30 and 2 am, ultimately giving Bush a second term.

The data was handled under a state contract funneled by Blackwell to Michael Connell, a shadowy Bush family IT specialist who programmed the official Bush-Cheney website in 2000 and 2004.

On the day before the 2008 election, Connell was forced to testify under oath under cross-examination by King-Lincoln-Bronzeville attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis. Among the questions at issue was whether Connell left any “Trojan Horse” programs in place in the Ohio electronic vote count structure through which he could have hacked the 2008 outcome.

There has yet to be a definitive answer to that question, or to what he actually may have done to the 2004 vote count. But, for what it’s worth, Karl Rove did shift his predictions from a McCain victory to one for Obama shortly after the federal court agreed to force Connell to testify.

There may be much to celebrate in the apparent legitimacy of the Ohio 2008 vote count.

But half the state’s ballots are still slated to be cast on electronic voting machines whose source codes remain under private lock and key. There is no guarantee Ohio voters will have universal access to paper ballots in future elections. In direct violation of federal law, no fewer than 56 of Ohio’s 88 counties destroyed all or most of their federal election records after the 2004 election, making a definitive recount impossible. There have been no state or federal prosecutions.

The “minor” irregularities and attempted voter disenfranchisements observed in Ohio 2008 were repeated throughout the US, and could easily resurface in future elections if they are not again thoroughly observed.

And in Columbus, the Republicans are right now suing Brunner to throw out thousands of provisional ballots cast in a Congressional race still in hot dispute. Incredibly, the GOP is operating on inside information fed it by Franklin County assistant BOE director Matt Damshroder.

Damshroder accepted a $10,000 check in his BOE office from a Diebold representative. The check was made out to the Republican Party. Damshroder was given a one-month paid suspension for this in 2005. With Democratic assent, he remains a key player in the vote count that will determine whether heavily Democratic Franklin County could be stopped from sending its first Democrat to Congress since 1980.

Nationwide the GOP successfully disenfranchised millions of likely voters in Election 2008. Easily hacked, un-monitorable e-voting machines are still spread throughout the United States. The opportunities to steal future elections that are certain to be far tighter than 2008 remain readily available.

Much has been learned in the Bush era of the Unelected President. There is simply no doubt that the thousands of volunteers who worked tirelessly to protect the election of 2008 in Ohio and throughout the nation in fact prevented the GOP from stealing yet another one.

But unless this administration implements automatic voter registration, universal hand counted paper ballots, the total elimination of electronic voting machines, expanded windows for voting and a far more secure system of impartial citizen observation, the specter of still more stolen elections will haunt our democracy.

Indeed, we will still have to wonder if that’s what we really have here.

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman’s four co-authored books on election protection include HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, and AS GOES OHIO, both available at www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. Their next and final book and movie on the topic are in the works. Their radio shows are broadcast at WVKO 1580AM, central Ohio’s Air America affiliate.
_______

About author

Harvey Wasserman is co-author, with Bob Fitrakis and Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?, just published by the New Press. He is author of SOLARTOPIA! and HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE U.S., available at www.harveywasserman.com.

 

is the party over at AIG?

AIG Party Watch: This time a resort in Phoenix

Tracy Coenen
Nov 11th 2008 at 11:00AM

AIG executives may not be making better business decisions while they’re asking the federal government for more money, but at least they’re getting sneakier! An ABC News investigation has revealed that a conference last week at the Pointe Hilton Squaw Peak Resort in Phoenix was another chance for AIG executives to frolic (on the taxpayers’ dime).

The conference was called the Asset Management Conference, and hotel personnel were ordered to not mention AIG either verbally or on signage. An AIG spokesperson told ABC News that there was no AIG signage because they wanted to lower the company’s profile. As consumers, I think we’re a little too smart to believe that. Something tells me that the company executives knew they’d get heat for another luxury trip.

There were 150 independent financial planners present at the conference, in addition to several top AIG executives. Yet hidden cameras caught top executives not attending sessions, and also captured images of limousines, fancy cocktail parties, and expensive dinners out.

Probably the biggest financial faux pas was booking former NFL quarterback Terry Bradshaw to speak at the event, at a fee of $40,000. AIG says that a sponsor was paying the fee, but they canceled his appearance. In total, AIG has said that the conference was to cost $343,000, with $320,000 of that covered by sponsor fees.

I understand the sponsorship dollars, and the attendance of the independent agents (who aren’t on AIG’s payroll, but are independents who only get paid when they sell something), and the continuing education aspect (many professions required continuing education). I just can’t help but feel that these events at expensive resorts are in poor taste… Especially as the federal money demanded by AIG has almost doubled since the original $85 billion plan was announced. The tab for AIG bailout dollars is now up to $150 billion.

Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Accounting, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.

democracy and liberty

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote.

Benjamin Franklin,
1759

john mccain’s morality and self-interest record

Rosa Brooks:

Keating 5 ring a bell?

McCain’s past collides with the present Wall Street debacle.

Rosa Brooks
September 25, 2008

Once upon a time, a politician took campaign contributions and favors from a friendly constituent who happened to run a savings and loan association. The contributions were generous: They came to about $200,000 in today’s dollars, and on top of that there were several free vacations for the politician and his family, along with private jet trips and other perks. The politician voted repeatedly against congressional efforts to tighten regulation of S&Ls, and in 1987, when he learned that his constituent’s S&L was the target of a federal investigation, he met with regulators in an effort to get them to back off.

That politician was John McCain, and his generous friend was Charles Keating, head of Lincoln Savings & Loan. While he was courting McCain and other senators and urging them to oppose tougher regulation of S&Ls, Keating was also investing his depositors’ federally insured savings in risky ventures. When those lost money, Keating tried to hide the losses from regulators by inducing his customers to switch from insured accounts to uninsured (and worthless) bonds issued by Lincoln’s near-bankrupt parent company. In 1989, it went belly up — and more than 20,000 Lincoln customers saw their savings vanish.

Keating went to prison, and McCain’s Senate career almost ended. Together with the rest of the so-called Keating Five — Sens. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), John Glenn (D-Ohio), Don Riegle (D-Mich.) and Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.), all of whom had also accepted large donations from Keating and intervened on his behalf — McCain was investigated by the Senate Ethics Committee and ultimately reprimanded for “poor judgment.”

But the savings and loan crisis mushroomed. Eventually, the government spent about $125 billion in taxpayer dollars to bail out hundreds of failed S&Ls that, like Keating’s, fell victim to a combination of private-sector greed and the “poor judgment” of politicians like McCain.

The $125 billion seems like small change compared to the $700-billion price tag for the Bush administration’s proposed Wall Street bailout. But the root causes of both crises are the same: a lethal mix of deregulation and greed.

Today’s meltdown began when unscrupulous mortgage lenders pushed naive borrowers to sign up for loans they couldn’t afford to pay back. The original lenders didn’t care: They pocketed the upfront fees and quickly sold the loans to others, who sold them to others still. With the government MIA, soon mortgage-backed securities were zipping around the globe. But by the time many ordinary people began to struggle to make their mortgage payments, the numerous “good” loans (held by borrowers able to pay) had gotten hopelessly mixed up with the bad loans. Investors and banks started to panic about being left with the hot potato — securities backed mainly by worthless loans. And so began the downward spiral of a credit crunch, short-selling, stock sell-offs and bankruptcies.

Could all this have been prevented? Sure. It’s not rocket science: A sensible package of regulatory reforms — like those Barack Obama has been pushing since well before the current meltdown began — could have kept this most recent crisis from escalating, just as maintaining reasonable regulatory regimes for S&Ls in the ’80s could have prevented that crisis (McCain learned this the hard way).

But, despite his political near-death experience as a member of the Keating Five, McCain continued to champion deregulation, voting in 2000, for instance, against federal regulation of the kind of financial derivatives at the heart of today’s crisis.

Shades of the Keating Five scandal don’t end there. This week, for instance, news broke that until August, the lobbying firm owned by McCain campaign manager Rick Davis was paid $15,000 a month by Freddie Mac, one of the mortgage giants implicated in the current crisis (now taken over by the government and under investigation by the FBI). Apparently, Freddie Mac’s plan was to gain influence with McCain’s campaign in hopes that he would help shield it from pesky government regulations. And until very recently, Freddie Mac executives probably figured money paid to Davis’ firm was money well spent. “I’m always in favor of less regulation,” McCain told the Wall Street Journal in March.

These days, McCain is singing a different tune.

“There are no atheists in foxholes and no ideologues in financial crises,” Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said last week, explaining the sudden mass conversion of so many onetime free marketeers into champions of robust government intervention. Fair enough. But as you try to figure out what and who can get us out of this mess, beware of those who now embrace regulation with the fervor of new converts.

wall street monster

The Monster That Ate Wall Street

 

They’re called “Off-Site Weekends”—rituals of the high-finance world in which teams of bankers gather someplace sunny to blow off steam and celebrate their successes as Masters of the Universe. Think yacht parties, bikini models, $1,000 bottles of Cristal. One 1994 trip by a group of JPMorgan bankers to the tony Boca Raton Resort & Club in Florida has become the stuff of Wall Street legend—though not for the raucous partying (although there was plenty of that, too). Holed up for most of the weekend in a conference room at the pink, Spanish-style resort, the JPMorgan bankers were trying to get their heads around a question as old as banking itself: how do you mitigate your risk when you loan money to someone? By the mid-’90s, JPMorgan’s books were loaded with tens of billions of dollars in loans to corporations and foreign governments, and by federal law it had to keep huge amounts of capital in reserve in case any of them went bad. But what if JPMorgan could create a device that would protect it if those loans defaulted, and free up that capital?

What the bankers hit on was a sort of insurance policy: a third party would assume the risk of the debt going sour, and in exchange would receive regular payments from the bank, similar to insurance premiums. JPMorgan would then get to remove the risk from its books and free up the reserves. The scheme was called a “credit default swap,” and it was a twist on something bankers had been doing for a while to hedge against fluctuations in interest rates and commodity prices. While the concept had been floating around the markets for a couple of years, JPMorgan was the first bank to make a big bet on credit default swaps. It built up a “swaps” desk in the mid-’90s and hired young math and science grads from schools like MIT and Cambridge to create a market for the complex instruments. Within a few years, the credit default swap (CDS) became the hot financial instrument, the safest way to parse out risk while maintaining a steady return. “I’ve known people who worked on the Manhattan Project,” says Mark Brickell, who at the time was a 40-year-old managing director at JPMorgan. “And for those of us on that trip, there was the same kind of feeling of being present at the creation of something incredibly important.”

Like Robert Oppenheimer and his team of nuclear physicists in the 1940s, Brickell and his JPMorgan colleagues didn’t realize they were creating a monster. Today, the economy is teetering and Wall Street is in ruins, thanks in no small part to the beast they unleashed 14 years ago. The country’s biggest insurance company, AIG, had to be bailed out by American taxpayers after it defaulted on $14 billion worth of credit default swaps it had made to investment banks, insurance companies and scores of other entities. So much of what’s gone wrong with the financial system in the past year can be traced back to credit default swaps, which ballooned into a $62 trillion market before ratcheting down to $55 trillion last week—nearly four times the value of all stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange. There’s a reason Warren Buffett called these instruments “financial weapons of mass destruction.” Since credit default swaps are privately negotiated contracts between two parties and aren’t regulated by the government, there’s no central reporting mechanism to determine their value. That has clouded up the markets with billions of dollars’ worth of opaque “dark matter,” as some economists like to say. Like rogue nukes, they’ve proliferated around the world and now lie hiding, waiting to blow up the balance sheets of countless other financial institutions.

It didn’t start out that way. One of the earliest CDS deals came out of JPMorgan in December 1997, when the firm put into place the idea hatched in Boca Raton. It essentially took 300 different loans, totaling $9.7 billion, that had been made to a variety of big companies like Ford, Wal-Mart and IBM, and cut them up into pieces known as “tranches” (that’s French for “slices”). The bank then identified the riskiest 10 percent tranche and sold it to investors in what was called the Broad Index Securitized Trust Offering, or Bistro for short. The Bistro was put together by Terri Duhon, at the time a 25-year-old MIT graduate working on JPMorgan’s credit swaps desk in New York—a division that would eventually earn the name the Morgan Mafia for the number of former members who went on to senior positions at global banks and hedge funds. “We made it possible for banks to get their credit risk off their books and into nonfinancial institutions like insurance companies and pension funds,” says Duhon, who now heads her own derivatives consulting business in London.

Before long, credit default swaps were being used to encourage investors to buy into risky emerging markets such as Latin America and Russia by insuring the debt of developing countries. Later, after corporate blowouts like Enron and WorldCom, it became clear there was a big need for protection against company implosions, and credit default swaps proved just the tool. By then, the CDS market was more than doubling every year, surpassing $100 billion in 2000 and totaling $6.4 trillion by 2004.

And then came the housing boom. As the Federal Reserve cut interest rates and Americans started buying homes in record numbers, mortgage-backed securities became the hot new investment. Mortgages were pooled together, and sliced and diced into bonds that were bought by just about every financial institution imaginable: investment banks, commercial banks, hedge funds, pension funds. For many of those mortgage-backed securities, credit default swaps were taken out to protect against default. “These structures were such a great deal, everyone and their dog decided to jump in, which led to massive growth in the CDS market,” says Rohan Douglas, who ran Salomon Brothers and Citigroup’s global credit swaps research division through the 1990s.

Soon, companies like AIG weren’t just insuring houses. They were also insuring the mortgages on those houses by issuing credit default swaps. By the time AIG was bailed out, it held $440 billion of credit default swaps. AIG’s fatal flaw appears to have been applying traditional insurance methods to the CDS market. There is no correlation between traditional insurance events; if your neighbor gets into a car wreck, it doesn’t necessarily increase your risk of getting into one. But with bonds, it’s a different story: when one defaults, it starts a chain reaction that increases the risk of others going bust. Investors get skittish, worrying that the issues plaguing one big player will affect another. So they start to bail, the markets freak out and lenders pull back credit.

The problem was exacerbated by the fact that so many institutions were tethered to one another through these deals. For example, Lehman Brothers had itself made more than $700 billion worth of swaps, and many of them were backed by AIG. And when mortgage-backed securities started going bad, AIG had to make good on billions of dollars of credit default swaps. Soon it became clear it wasn’t going to be able to cover its losses. And since AIG’s stock was one of the components of the Dow Jones industrial average, the plunge in its share price pulled down the entire average, contributing to the panic.

The reason the federal government stepped in and bailed out AIG was that the insurer was something of a last backstop in the CDS market. While banks and hedge funds were playing both sides of the CDS business—buying and trading them and thus offsetting whatever losses they took—AIG was simply providing the swaps and holding onto them. Had it been allowed to default, everyone who’d bought a CDS contract from the company would have suffered huge losses in the value of the insurance contracts they hadpurchased, causing them their own credit problems.

Given the CDSs’ role in this mess, it’s likely that the federal government will start regulating them; New York state has already said it will begin doing so in January. “Sadly, they’ve been vilified,” says Duhon, who helped get the whole thing started with that Bistro deal a decade ago. “It’s like saying it’s the gun’s fault when someone gets shot.” But just as one might want to regulate street sales of AK-47s, there’s an argument to be made that credit default swaps can be dangerous in the wrong hands. “It made it a lot easier for some people to get into trouble,” says Darrell Duffie, an economist at Stanford. Although he believes credit default swaps have been “dramatically misused,” Duffie says he still believes they’re a very effective tool and shouldn’t be done away with entirely. Besides, he says, “if you outlaw them, then the financial engineers will just come up with something else that gets around the regulation.” As Wall Street and Washington wring their hands over how to prevent future financial crises, we can only hope they re-read Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”

© 2008

off with his head!

McCain Loses His Head

 

“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that “McCain untethered” — disconnected from knowledge and principle — had made a “false and deeply unfair” attack on Cox that was “unpresidential” and demonstrated that McCain “doesn’t understand what’s happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does.”

To read the Journal’s details about the depths of McCain’s shallowness on the subject of Cox’s chairmanship, see “McCain’s Scapegoat” (Sept. 19). Then consider McCain’s characteristic accusation that Cox “has betrayed the public’s trust.”

Perhaps an old antagonism is involved in McCain’s fact-free slander. His most conspicuous economic adviser is Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who previously headed the Congressional Budget Office. There he was an impediment to conservatives, including then-Rep. Cox, who, as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, persistently tried and generally failed to enlist CBO support for “dynamic scoring” that would estimate the economic growth effects of proposed tax cuts.

In any case, McCain’s smear — that Cox “betrayed the public’s trust” — is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are “corrupt” or “betray the public’s trust,” two categories that seem to be exhaustive — there are no other people. McCain’s Manichaean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law’s restrictions on campaigning. Today, his campaign is creatively finding interstices in laws intended to restrict campaign giving and spending. (For details, see The Post of Sept. 17; and the New York Times of Sept. 19.)

By a Gresham’s Law of political discourse, McCain’s Queen of Hearts intervention in the opaque financial crisis overshadowed a solid conservative complaint from the Republican Study Committee, chaired by Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the RSC decried the improvised torrent of bailouts as a “dangerous and unmistakable precedent for the federal government both to be looked to and indeed relied upon to save private sector companies from the consequences of their poor economic decisions.” This letter, listing just $650 billion of the perhaps more than $1 trillion in new federal exposures to risk, was sent while McCain’s campaign, characteristically substituting vehemence for coherence, was airing an ad warning that Obama favors “massive government, billions in spending increases.”

The political left always aims to expand the permeation of economic life by politics. Today, the efficient means to that end is government control of capital. So, is not McCain’s party now conducting the most leftist administration in American history? The New Deal never acted so precipitously on such a scale. Treasury Secretary Paulson, asked about conservative complaints that his rescue program amounts to socialism, said, essentially: This is not socialism, this is necessary. That non sequitur might be politically necessary, but remember that government control of capital is government control of capitalism. Does McCain have qualms about this, or only quarrels?

On “60 Minutes” Sunday evening, McCain, saying “this may sound a little unusual,” said that he would like to replace Cox with Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic attorney general of New York who is the son of former governor Mario Cuomo. McCain explained that Cuomo has “respect” and “prestige” and could “lend some bipartisanship.” Conservatives have been warned.

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

georgewill@washpost.com

from democracy now…w.h. manages the daily news

McClellan: White House Fed Talking Points to Fox News
Former White House spokesperson Scott McClellan has revealed the Bush administration routinely fed talking points to several top hosts at the Rupert Murdoch-owned network Fox News. McClellan was interviewed by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews.

Scott McClellan: “Certainly, there were commentators and others, pundits at Fox News, that were helpful to the White House, and then, certainly—yeah, certainly, we got talking points to those people.”

Chris Matthews: “Did you use—did people say ‘Call Sean. Call Bill. Call whoever’? Did you do that as a regular thing?”

McClellan: “Certainly, certainly. It wasn’t necessarily something I was doing, but it was something that we at the White House, yes, were doing, and getting them talking points and making sure they knew where we were coming from.”

Matthews: “So you were giving them talking points”—

McClellan: “But I would separate the journalists.”

Matthews: “No, no. This is important. You were using these commentators as your spokespeople.”

McClellan: “Well, certainly. I mean, certainly, I think that happens both ways, when people go on other networks, as well, that are favorable towards the Democrats and so forth.”

Matthews: “Nobody’s ever fed me any crap like that, so I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

McClellan: “Well, you’re an independent-minded guy.”

The White House has not denied McClellan’s statement.