Category Archives: Leadership

Thomas Smith and the pirates

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Among my e-mails today was one calling my attention to an interview (by someone I’m not familiar with, if you’ll forgive the dangling preposition) with Columbia’s Thomas Smith about the pirates. A sample:

TUSR: Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was stunned
by the pirates’ reach. I was taken aback by Mullen’s surprise—the reach
has been well-documented in all manner of media, even a lengthy feature
in National Geographic this year that somewhat romanticized the
pirates. So why is an admiral stunned?
SMITH: Admiral
Mullen was ‘stunned’ by the pirate attack taking place so far from the
coast, about 450 miles offshore. The attack in fact was a bit
surprising. It was bold, very risky for the attackers, and much farther
out into the so-called ‘blue water’ than previous attacks we’ve seen by
similar bands in recent history.

Now, I’ve since seen a few
bloggers and others criticizing the admiral for his remarks –
suggesting that no true fighting admiral would say such – and perhaps
‘stunned’ was a less-than-stellar word choice. But the admiral is a
professional Naval officer, not a politician. And so I say, it’s easy
for those who have never been to war or to sea—and have no frame of
reference for an appreciation of just how vast and unforgiving the sea
can be—to criticize.

And as long as I’m on the subject, there was a nice piece in the WSJ Saturday drawing some parallels to the Barbary Pirates. I sort of knew the outline of all of that, being a history major who sorta kinda concentrated on that period, but I learned at least one interesting fact from the piece I don’t remember having known before:

By the 1790s, the U.S. was depositing an astonishing 20% of its federal income into North African coffers…

We finally decided maybe it would be better to build a Navy, and deal with the problem. Trying to buy off the pirates just encouraged piracy — which sort of stands to reason, if you think about it.

Anyway, the piece further encouraged a notion I’ve been kicking around, which might turn into a column: The idea that the Somali pirates actually pose an opportunity to President Obama once he’s in office. It’s a chance to show the willingness to use force in the defense of international peace and security, with a ready-made multinational coalition to dramatically demonstrate his unBushness:

Of course, the world is a vastly more complicated place than it was two
centuries ago and America’s role in it, once peripheral, is now
preeminent. Still, in the post-9/11 period, America would be
ill-advised to act unilaterally against the pirates. The good news is:
It does not have to. In contrast to the refusal to unite with America
during the Barbary Wars, or more recently the Iraq War, the European
states today share America’s interest in restoring peace to the seas.
Moreover, they have expressed a willingness to cooperate with American
military measures against the Somali bandits. Unlike Washington and
Jefferson, George W. Bush and Barack Obama need not stand alone.

Do I HAVE to go back to writing about Sanford?

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Well, it was nice while it lasted — writing about the presidential contest between two guys I liked. It was the first time in my career that had happened, and I got as excited about it all as anyone did, I suppose.

But now I turn back to South Carolina, where our last election for a chief executive was between Mark Sanford and Tommy Moore. Fortunately, we don’t have Tommy to kick around any more, since he went to work for his pals in the payday industry.

But we’re stuck with Mark Sanford. I was unpleasantly reminded of this by the op-ed piece he wrote for The Wall Street Journal last week. It was classic Sanford posturing, another sequel of his personal movie, "Me Against the Big Spenders." It was headlined "Don’t Bail Out My State." It’s filled with the kind of self-aggrandizing, Look At ME stuff that drives others at our State House bonkers.

Anyway, I wrote about it for Sunday, but I’ll have you know I didn’t enjoy it. The prospect of anything positive happening at the State House is just so dim, that it’s depressing.

Back on this post, Doug asked who I believed in the conflict between Nikki and the speaker. Oh, Nikki, of course, I said.

That doesn’t mean I don’t fully understand how it must frost the speaker to see members of the House joining the governor in his holier-than-thou posturing. But you see, like the broken clock, sometimes Sanford postures in favor of the right thing. That’s one of the really disappointing things about him. He’s made so many enemies in the Legislature that it has doomed the causes he was right to advocate, such as government restructuring. We’re at the point now that we’re WAY past the Legislature’s ingrained resistance to reform. Now, they’ll oppose it just for the pleasure of frustrating HIM. It’s an unhealthy situation for us all.

And Nikki’s campaign for recorded votes is the right thing. Sure, there might be practical reasons against making ALL votes recorded, but the House can do an awful lot better than it does.

Dick Riley makes TIME’s Cabinet Top 10

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Rileydick

Well, this is pretty awesome — Dick Riley, who as we know was no slouch of a governor, has made TIME magazine's list of Top Ten Best Cabinet Members of modern times. It's quite a list:

  1. Harold L. Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, 1933-1946
  2. Henry Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture, 1933-1940
  3. Henry Morgenthau Jr., Secretary of the Treasury, 1934-1945
  4. George Marshall, Secretary of State, 1947-1949
  5. Robert F. Kennedy, Attorney General, 1961-1964
  6. William Ruckelshaus, Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency, 1970-1973, 1983-1985
  7. Elizabeth Dole, Secretary of Transportation, 1983-1987
  8. Richard Riley, Secretary of Education, 1993-2001
  9. Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor, 1993-1997
  10. Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense, 2006-present

You may quibble about some of them after Marshall — as we get closer to our own time, people seem less "great;" we see their flaws all too clearly. For instance, we who admire Gov. Riley may object to his having to follow someone rejected by the voters just last week. But being rejected by the voters should not diminish our respect for past achievement. Just ask Winston Churchill (you know, the guy who wasn't the Labour guy). Besides, one can excel as a Cabinet member but be less respected in other fields of endeavor. For instance, Henry Wallace made TIME's list of worst vice presidents.

And to earlier generations, someone we think of as a giant of history might have been looked upon as, "just this guy, you know." For instance, when he was growing up in Kensington, Md., my Dad used to hitchhike to junior high school on Connecticut Ave. One day, Harold Ickes stopped to pick him up. Dad rode up front with the chauffeur (OK, so he wasn't totally an ordinary guy). Another time, FDR rode by, and waved. (Though I obviously was not there, I have a vivid "memory" of that in my head — FDR in a convertible, the big, encouraging grin, the cigarette holder at a jaunty angle…)

Ozmint wants to let prisoners go — what else can he do?

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This just in from the AP:

{BC-SC—State Budget-Prisons,0113}
{SC prison chief preps inmate-release plans}
{Eds: APNewsNow. Will be updated.}
   COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina’s prison chief says he has a plan to release inmates early because of a budget shortfall.
   Prison agency director Jon Ozmint told the state’s financial oversight board Thursday he’s prepared to submit an early release plan to the Legislature to ease a deficit of more than $14 million. Earlier this year, legislators rejected Ozmint’s proposal to cut time off the end of sentences.
   The Budget and Control Board is monitoring Ozmint’s shortfall. Gov. Mark Sanford heads the board and says he’s not ready to endorse that kind of plan. He says people committing crimes should know sentences will be carried out.

That’s a short item, but it raises several points:

  • The governor is not the "head" of the Budget and Control Board, in the sense of controlling anything. He’s one of five votes.
  • He IS, however, the boss of Jon Ozmint. Meaning that any plan Mr. Ozmint comes up with that doesn’t have his blessing seems unlikely to see the light of day. Of course, maybe some of those lawmakers who give Ozmint such short shrift because he’s Sanford’s man will actually pay attention if they think it would irk the governor. But the smart money would be on lawmakers doing what they always do — continue to shamefully neglect Corrections, when they’re not pointlessly persecuting it.
  • Sanford picked Ozmint because he was a very conservative, small-gummint sort of Republican. So why would they disagree on this point? Because Mr. Ozmint has for several years had the responsibility, day after day, of actually trying to run the prisons and keep the prisoners inside them with a budget that has shrunk year after years. And faced with that reality, he knows he can’t keep doing it. Mark Sanford’s opinions regarding what it costs to run government properly are entirely theoretical, and immune to practical reality.
  • I recall Mr. Ozmint showing me a while back exactly how thin security was at the time — this many people per that many prisoners, THIS part of a perimeter covered but not THAT part. It was very alarming. And that was several budget cuts ago.
  • We’ve said this many times; perhaps someday the folks at the State House will listen: As much as we need to appropriate more for prisons, the REAL solution is to stop locking up so many people we don’t NEED to lock up — a category that covers most non-violent offenders.
  • Henry McMaster needs to back off on the "no-parole" stuff, and ramp up his efforts to push alternative sentencing.

The creeping sense of letdown

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This feeling has been creeping up on me in recent weeks, and it’s just emerged into my consciousness in the last days. I hesitated to mention it, and it seems particularly inappropriate given the fact that people are turning out in droves to vote, but…

The election has been a real letdown for me. And I didn’t expect that.

Remember back in January, when I said that if our two endorsees for the major party nominations both made it to the November ballot, it would be a win-win proposition for the country? Well, I did say it, and I meant it. But somehow, between then and now, my enthusiasm has just dissipated, like air slowly but steadily leaking from a balloon.

Part of this is just due to the fact that I was never going to enjoy the general election campaign as much as I did the primaries, nor would I appreciate these two candidates as much as party standard-bearers. They were SO much more appealing as insurgents — McCain running and prevailing against all the diehard GOPpers, over their vehement protests, and doing it even after his candidacy was declared dead. Obama running as the alternative to continuing the vicious, pointless partisanship of the Clinton-Bush years. But the climax of this drama seems to have occurred when they triumphed over their parties’ orthodoxies. Nothing has seemed that fun or that inspiring since then.

McCain picking Sarah Palin to please the base was bad, but Obama leading the charge of the crowd pretending that John McCain was some sort of incarnation of George W. Bush was, if anything, worse. All of it was dispiriting. I first noted that during the Democratic Convention; and while there were moments in McCain’s acceptance speech where he was almost the guy he needed to be to keep me applauding, he fell short of the mark.

Beyond those factors, three things contributed to my present political ennui:

  1. McCain utterly failing to put his best foot — or even his second-best foot — forward. Every time he opened his mouth, I kept hoping he would explain clearly, in a way undecided voters couldn’t miss, why he was the guy. I still thought he was the guy myself, but it would have been nice if he had helped others see it. It’s like he was going through the motions ever since he upstaged himself with the Palin selection. This is a weird and unfair thing to say, but… you know those appearances he did on SNL Saturday and Monday nights? He was game, and I give him that, but… he just fell flat. It wasn’t funny. No, he’s not a professional comedian, but he can be funny — one moment when he was his old self, but I think too few people saw it, was at the Alfred E. Smith dinner. He was hilarious. His timing, and his feel for his audience was impeccable. But the SNL appearances were a letdown. Blame the writing if you will, but it was sort of symbolic to me of the way he generally failed to connect throughout the fall. Sometimes you click; sometimes you don’t. Yeah, I know that seems stupid, but what I’m trying to say is that he no more clicked as a presidential candidate during these weeks than he did on SNL. If you don’t know what I mean, go back and watch the debates. He was saying the right things, but not clicking. As I mentioned in a previous post, our endorsement was about his record, not about what we saw in the campaign. I’d endorse him again given the chance, but next time I would hope he’d help himself out more.
  2. That shouldn’t have mattered given the "win-win" situation I had predicted back in January. With one guy faltering, that left us with Obama. But I found myself less and less enchanted with him as the campaign wore on. He, unlike McCain, never missed a step. He was on his game at every moment of every day, with a steadiness and discipline that seemed superhuman. That wasn’t the problem. The one real up-side I saw to the future, contemplating the future with a President Obama, was that he has consistently shown such stellar abilities with the intangibles of leadership, from his general unflappability to his rhetorical talents. The problem was that I started paying more attention to what he actually had to say about some issues, and started doing so in a more critical fashion, as I pondered our upcoming endorsement. And, as I’ve said in recent days, I got really, really disturbed about some of the things he said, because they were SO off-the-shelf, liberal Democratic dogmatic. (Ironically, the debates had a big impact on me here — even as I was disappointed at McCain’s political skills on those occasions, I became more and more disturbed by precisely what Obama was saying so smoothly.) Before, I had just accepted that he and I wouldn’t agree on abortion, for instance — something I had to accept in backing Joe Lieberman or practically any other Democrat. But then I started peeling the layers, and each new layer worried me more. First, his lack of concern for the moral value of the unborn seemed to go beyond most Democrats, and I just started fully noticing that near the end. Then there was his unwillingness to consider judicial candidates who didn’t agree with him on the issue. Then there was his equating the nebulous "right to privacy" with the right to free speech. Then there was his utter dismissal of the rights or duties of the political branches to decide such issues with that "state referendums" nonsense. Then I saw similar patterns on free trade, and there was a disturbing willingness to be doctrinaire on Big Labor’s agenda, not a transformative figure at all. Combine that with the inevitability of bigger Democratic majorities, and instead of a post-partisan president, you’ve got textbook Democrat, and that set us up for more partisan warfare in the coming years, not less.
  3. Finally, there was the staggering economic news of the last couple of months. On a pure electoral plane, this as much as anything is what has delivered the election to Obama. But I gotta tell you, I sure wish I could be as sanguine as the Obamaniacs are about his ability to lead us through this. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think McCain could, either. It’s just that I have seen little to make me think Obama has a better idea of how to approach this. I wasn’t kidding when I said, several weeks back, that what we need is another FDR. And neither of these guys fills the bill, the way I see it. This factor has done as much as anything else to grind down my enthusiasm, day after day. Did you see the lead story in The Wall Street Journal today? That’s our reality, folks. I really, really hope that the Obama supporters are right and I’m wrong, and he WILL have what it takes to lead us to turn back the tide. But I remain worried.

Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe this is just physical exhaustion. Maybe it’s the wild ride of the past two years, all the excitement — all the fun we’ve had here on the blog, for that matter, with page views now essentially double the year before. And so on pure adrenaline, I’m due for a letdown. But I think it’s more than that.

In the last few weeks, I’ve said a bunch of times that I looked forward to this being over. But I just realized today that I won’t feel that way at all. Instead, I fear, the letdown will be complete rather than merely imminent, and I’ve just come to realize that. No, not because "my guy" lost the presidential election. It’s more because I thought it was win-win, and then I realized that it wasn’t, and that whoever won, we were going to have a mess that we still have to get through. The economy will still be a mess. We’ll still have the same problems with Iran, Russia, Venezuela, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, China… and ourselves. We won’t even be poised to solve our health care crisis, because even with a bigger Democratic majority and a liberal Democrat in the White House, no one will say "single-payer." The irony of that is palpable to me. (We’ll get the BAD stuff of liberal Democratic ideology — the activist judges, the intimidation of unwilling workers into unions, trade isolationism, and the like — without a National Health Plan. Sheesh.)

Basically, I realized fully, on an emotional level, that neither McCain nor Obama was going to deliver us from all that. And once the election is over, we no longer have the luxury of pretending that they might do so. So I think that’s why I’m down.

Sorry to rain on the parade. Y’all go ahead and have a nice time, though …

Mayor Bob’s update on bus funding

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Just now getting to my weekend e-mails, and I see this one from Bob Coble:

I wanted to give you an update from the City County RTA Committee that met at City Hall last Thursday. City Council members include me, EW Cromartie, and Kirkman Finlay. Belinda Gergel also joined us. County Council members include Damon Jeter, Val Hutchinson, and Joyce Dickerson. Chairman Joe McEachern also attended. The Greater Columbia Chamber of Commerce and other groups also were in attendance. The first meeting had four presentations from staff on a variety of background issues. Joe Cronin of the County gave an excellent overview of how our RTA compares to peer cities. I believe that all the Committee members strongly agree on two fundamental points. First that transit is an essential public service that is critical for those who depend on bus service to get to their job and the doctor; an essential environmental tool to prevent non-attainment status and become a green community; and is vital to continuing economic development. Secondly, that the County and the City have the capacity to provide funding currently and it would be unacceptable not to do so.

Frannie Heizer, as the attorney for the RTA, presented the current legal options for funding. She made the following points: First, a sales tax referendum could not be held until November 2010 (Richland County Council could call the referendum now for 2010). Secondly, Frannie believes that the use of hospitality tax for transit would require a change of state law in the 2009 Legislative Session. The County has asked for an Attorney General’s Opinion to see if hospitality tax could be used now without a change in state law. Thirdly, neither City nor County property tax can be used without a referendum and then property tax would be limited by the cap on milage. Fourth, the mass transit fee by the County and the vehicle registration fee by the City and County are available now (both fees are different legally but to the taxpayer are paid in the same way and the same amount). 

When we establish a funding plan, other issues that were discussed included the need for other governments and partners to participate in funding the RTA; doing a comprehensive operations analysis; and changing the RTA organizational structure to have advisory members for those governments that are not providing money to the system.

The next meeting will be Friday November 14th at 9:30 am at the RTA headquarters on Lucius Road. We are inviting three members from the Lexington County Council to participate.

Thanks. I will keep you updated.

Obama should back single-payer again, and do it NOW

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Assuming we’re all agreed that Barack Obama is going to be the president, there’s one thing I wish he’d go ahead and do right now: Return to his onetime support for a single-payer health care system.

As you know, I came to two conclusions awhile back:

  1. That only a single-payer plan would solve our country’s problems paying for health care. Anything short of that just further complicates the problem. We miss the mark by talking all the time about the "uninsured." It’s the majority of us who ARE covered, but increasingly can’t afford our health care bills anyway, who are the much greater problem. We need to eliminate the for-profit middlemen in the equation.
  2. The only way we’ll get single-payer is for someone to RUN for president on that platform and win convincingly. If Obama (or, to stretch a point, McCain) announced AFTER getting elected that he wanted a single-payer system, Congress would tell him to go fly a kite. The private insurance industry — folks like my old friend Joel Wood — have WAY too much juice on the Hill for a president to make than happen unless he has a clear electoral mandate to do it.

As I wrote in December of last year:

    And the operative word is “bold.” Why? Because unless we start the conversation there, all we might hope for is that a few more of the one out of seven Americans who don’t have insurance will be in the “system” with the rest of us — if that, after the inevitable watering-down by Congress. And that’s not “reform.” Actual reform would rescue all of us from a “system” that neither American workers nor American employers can afford to keep propping up.

A lot of people have high hopes for Obama changing this country for the better. There is no more dramatic way he could do so than to win after coming out for a REAL health care solution.

No, he’s not going to do that. He’s way too cautious, far too deliberate. He sticks to his game plan. He’s not going to rock that boat now. If I thought I could convince him — and thought he could win — I’d urge McCain to do it. As we know, he’s far more willing to throw the dice (can you say, "Sarah Palin"?). But he’s never shown any interest in single-payer. But as Hillary Clinton pointed out back before the S.C. primary, Obama used to be for it, before he was against it.

But I wish he would. I think he’d still win, and then he could do some real good on this, our most important domestic issue.

Video of that awful Pelosi speech

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Kelly Davis with thestate.com noticed my post about the Nancy Pelosi speech Monday — the one that was an outrageous example of partisan ranting at the worst possible moment, but certainly no excuse for those whiny Republicans to vote against a bill of great importance to the country — and felt like something was missing: video. So he sent me the imbed code.

I actually haven’t seen it myself yet — I just read the transcript that I shared with you earlier — and don’t have time to watch it now. But I don’t see any reason for y’all to wait any longer. Kelly sent me this early yesterday afternoon and I’m just seeing his e-mail, so we’re already behind the curve enough…

Biggest one-day Dow drop in history (nice going there, Washington)

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Wall_street_wart

Robert was finishing up a late-breaking cartoon for tomorrow (combining the Friday night debates with the collapses in Washington and New York today), and he mentioned he’d heard that the Dow had its biggest one-day drop in history today.

I said nah — it was bad, but not that bad. He was right; I was wrong. Turns out that was the GOOD news. Other indexes did worse than the Dow.

Here’s the WSJ version. The NYT version sugarcoated it a little, saying it was the biggest drop "in two decades" (I haven’t checked their math). And here’s the AP version:

By TIM PARADIS – AP Business Writer
NEW YORK — Wall Street’s worst fears came to pass Monday, when the government’s financial rescue plan failed in Congress and stocks plunged precipitously – hurtling the Dow Jones industrials down nearly 7 percent. The almost 780-point decline was the largest one-day point drop ever for the index.

The percentage declines for the Standard & Poor’s 500 and Nasdaq composite indexes were even larger. And credit markets, whose turmoil helped feed the stock market’s angst, froze up further amid the growing belief that the country is headed into a spreading credit and economic crisis.

Stunned traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, their faces tense and mouths agape, watched on TV screens as the House voted down in midafternoon the administration’s $700 billion plan to buy up distressed mortgage securities. Activity on the floor became frenetic as the "sell" orders blew in.

The Dow told the story of the market’s despair. The blue chip index, dropped by hundreds of points in a matter of moments, and by the end of the day had passed by far its previous record for a one-day drop, 684.81, set in the first trading day after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

The selling was so intense that just 162 stocks rose on the NYSE – and 3,073 dropped.

It takes an incredible amount of fear to set off such an intense reaction on Wall Street, and the worry now is that with the rescue plan’s fate uncertain, no one knows how the financial sector hobbled by hundreds of billions of dollars in bad mortgage bets will recover….

Nice going there, Washington. Nice leadership. Got any more tricks up your sleeves? You hammerheads…

Wall_street_wart2

All SC members voted for bailout, except Barrett

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The "how they voted" on the collapsed bailout plan is pretty simple: Every S.C. member of the U.S. House voted FOR the bailout, except Gresham Barrett.

Here’s his explanation (short version: It’s about him and his ideology.):

Washington, DC – Congressman Gresham Barrett (SC, 3) delivered the following remarks regarding his concerns with the level of government intervention and lack of free market principles included in H.R. 3997, the Financial Stabilization Package:

"First off, I want to commend my colleagues, especially Minority Leader John Boehner, Roy Blunt, Eric Cantor, and Ranking Member Spencer Bachus, for their work in improving this bill.  However, after careful – and agonizing – consideration, I cannot support H.R. 3997 and will be voting no.

"I understand the need to act and I understand the urge to act quickly. We must restore the flow of credit. I firmly subscribe to the belief that “Main Street” and Wall Street are inextricably linked.  Instability in the financial markets leads to instability in taxpayers’ personal accounts and their personal funds.  Meanwhile, that capital that flows through our financial markets is vital to the continued success of our businesses, large and small.  We should all agree that a failure of our credit markets would be an enormous catastrophe, and the government does have a role in ensuring that the financial markets function soundly.

"At the same time, we cannot allow the American taxpayers to become the insurance policy for financial decisions that did not turn out as planned.  Whether you’re talking about someone from South Carolina who took a mortgage they couldn’t afford or a Wall Street banker who financed that loan, we see just how important personal responsibility must be to American society, and I fear that this legislation erodes that accountability – and the freedom that comes with it. 

"Unfortunately, our government is in debt.  And we are in a lot of debt, both as a government and as a nation.  In fact, this whole crisis is built around debt, where too much bad debt has caused an inability to get new credit – otherwise known as debt.  My daddy always told me that you can’t borrow your way out of debt, and he was right.

"There are other reasonable options that we should explore to help the markets heal themselves and that would not burden our country under even greater mounds of debt.  I was pushing for a plan that would use more free market principles such as a suspension of the capital gains tax and incentives for repatriation of earnings, o help spur economic growth by helping all Americans whose retirement accounts are invested in the stock market, or who own a house, or a business and jump start the flow of funds back into the system.

"There is no doubt that we find ourselves in a precarious situation and people are angry, rightly so.  I am angry.  But we must not allow this anger to cloud our judgment, and make choices that will divide our country. This is not a matter of Wall Street versus Main Street.

"But when it becomes time to vote on this bill, I will be voting no. I understand my colleagues for their reasoning, and I am confident that we all want to do what’s best for the country. But, because I believe so strongly in the principles of the free market and the belief in freedom, I will be opposing this bill.  My fear is that today the government will be forever changing the face of the American free market."

       ###

What I have not seen yet is any indication whether Mr. Barrett had any notion whether the bailout would actually fail on account of him and the others voting "no," or did he just intend to make a gesture? When I hear more on that, I’ll pass it on…

Bailout deal collapses, and so does Wall St.

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Remember way back this morning when all those "leaders" of both parties in Washington had worked out a bailout deal. Well, never mind:

WASHINGTON — The House on Monday defeated a $700 billion emergency rescue for the nation’s financial system, ignoring urgent warnings from President Bush and congressional leaders of both parties that the economy could nosedive into recession without it. Stocks plummeted on Wall Street even before the 228-205 vote to reject the bill was announced on the House floor.

Bush and a host of leading congressional figures had implored the lawmakers to pass the legislation despite howls of protest from their constituents back home. Despite pressure from supporters, not enough members were willing to take the political risk just five weeks before an election.

Ample no votes came from both the Democratic and Republican sides of the aisle. More than two-thirds of Republicans and 40 percent of Democrats opposed the bill.

But just in case you’re now thinking that politicians are a bunch of jumpy, lily-livered cowards who can’t be relied upon to be cool in a crisis, take a look at what’s happening on Wall Street:

NEW YORK — Fear swept across the financial markets Monday, sending the Dow Jones industrials down as much as 705 points, after the government’s financial bailout package failed to survive a vote in the House.

As the vote was shown on TV, stocks plunged and investors fled to the safety of the credit markets, worrying that the financial system would now keep sinking under the weight of failed mortgage debt.

"Clearly something needs to be done, and the market dropping 400 points in 10 minutes is telling you that," said Chris Johnson president of Johnson Research Group. "This isn’t a market for the timid."

While investors had some worries that the vote would be close, many on Wall Street appeared to believe it would ultimately pass. The proposal wasn’t been seen on the Street as a panacea for the deepening problems in the financial sector that have led to the failure of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Washington Mutual Inc. and the forced sale of Merrill Lynch & Co. and Wachovia Corp. – and that still pose a threat to many other banks.

The markets turned highly volatile as it became clear the measure wouldn’t find the necessary support. The Dow regained ground then fell back again, trading down 524.88, or 4.71 percent, to 10,618.25. At its low, it was down 705.06, not far from its previous record for an intraday drop, 721.56, set during the first trading day after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Still, in percentage terms, the decline remained well below the more than 20 percent drops seen on Black Monday of October 1987 and the Depression.

Broader stock indicators also tumbled. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index declined 74.52, or 6.14 percent, to 1,138.75, and the Nasdaq composite index fell 139.00, or 6.37 percent, to 2,204.34.

The Federal Reserve declined to comment on the market’s decline.

With Wall Street in turmoil, the yield on the 3-month Treasury bill fell to 0.32 percent from 0.87 percent on Friday. That showed that investors were prepared to get meager returns on an investment as long as it was secure. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note, which moves opposite its price, fell to 3.69 percent from 3.84 percent late Thursday.

Investors also faced other worries about the banking system. Wachovia became the latest big bank to be rescued from its overwhelming bad mortgage debt, agreeing to a Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.-brokered buyout of its banking operations by Citigroup Inc.

Marc Pado, U.S. market strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald, said investors are worried about the spread of troubles beyond banks in the U.S. to Europe and other markets.

"Things are dying and breaking apart while they sit there and vote on this thing," he said.

So nice going all around, fellas. Ya bunch of feckless twits…

Scattered thoughts on the debate

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First, I’ll refer you to video from the panel discussion last night, where you will find Joshua Gross and others offering their thoughts.

I was wiped out last night, and didn’t stick around to talk to folks after the discussion ended a little before midnight. Long day. I hope folks didn’t think I was rude, but I’d been fighting a cold and had no resources left. I’d told everyone at the start that I was just there to observe; it was the newsroom’s show.

On my way out I did run into our own Norm Ivey, who was there sporting an Obama ’08 T-shirt. You can see some of Norm’s recent comments on this post, and this one, and this one.

As I said last night from my Treo, I don’t think this was a debate that changed any minds — although Norm raised the interesting point that the candidates were speaking to voters who hadn’t paid attention until now, and that on that score he thought McCain did better. I can’t say, because I wasn’t looking for that while I watched.

Nor do I have an overall observation or theme. I thought each candidate exhibited some strengths and weaknesses, as follows:

McCain strengths:

  • Having been right about the Surge. There’s so much more to that than the fact that by sending those extra troops, and using them properly, we created a stituation in which we can start talking about drawing down and leaving behind a stable Iraq. It goes to the core fact that McCain was right, and Bush was wrong, for four years before the president finally got rid of Rumsfeld and switched to a strategy that would work. This narrative (and so many other things) gives the lie to the Democrats’ "McCain equals Bush" nonsense. It communicates that he won’t give up on our nation’s commitments, or let American blood be spent for nought. And it shows he knows the differences between approaches likely to work, and those not to.
  • The constant reminders of his long experience with these issues. The answer he gave to the "bomb, bomb Iran" remark was his best moment. He gave the history of his judgments of major decisions involving the deployment of our military, from being against sending the Marines to Lebanon in 83 to backing Clinton on Bosnia in defiance of many in his party. It strongly suggested the thought, "Oh, yeah — and Obama just got to the Senate…"
  • His long-held opposition to earmarks and wasteful spending, and clear willingness to use his veto and the bully pulpit to fight it. Lehrer was irritating with his constant hammering on "if the bailout passes, what will you give up," but McCain gave the best answer.
  • The reminder that he and Biden pushed through the 9/11 commission, again in spite of the Bush administration.
  • His answer on the initial economic question, emphasizing how encourage he was that Democrats and Republicans were working together finally, made Obama’s answer about "failed policies" of Republicans look petty.

McCain weaknesses

  • One overrides all others, and he did it repeatedly and intentionally — his condescending references to Obama "not understanding" issues. Obama is a smart man, but even if he weren’t, McCain’s constant attempts to put him down would have been unseemly, and beneath him. Yes, I believe there are some things Obama "doesn’t get," but that’s not a gentlemanly way of putting it, and I’m betting it created a lot of sympathy for Obama. Most of all, it was inconsistent with the sort of man McCain is — he is usually deeply humble and gracious to those who disagree with him (something that I think is all the more admirable because of his natural temper; he has chosen to be mild in disagreement, and it speaks well of him). This was artificial and offensive, and whoever talked him into taking this approach should not be listened to again.
  • As we knew already, he is not as smoothly articulate as his opponent. He lost himself in his sentences a number of times, particularly toward the end, and that did him no good.

Obama strengths

  • His argument that Iraq has sapped our resources to the point that we can’t "project force" where we need to elsewhere in the world. Yes, Democrats have long said this in regard to Afghanistan, but he took it beyond that. This remains the strongest argument that critics of our involvement in Iraq have, and he used it well, doing an excellent job of distancing himself from those in his party who are reflexively against ANY military action, and that’s something he has to do to be credible as a candidate for commander in chief.
  • Beyond exhausting the military, he also made a good argument that Iraq has enabled and strengthened Iran — a familiar argument, but he presented it well.
  • His gracious acknowledgment of the courageous leadership McCain showed in standing up to the administration on torture. The normal Democratic position is that McCain "caved" on the issue, and is no better than Bush. That’s a deeply unfair characterization, and Obama showed himself to be above that.
  • More articulate, as always (see "McCain weaknesses").

Obama weaknesses

  • Continuing to be wrong on the Surge, and not acknowledging it, hurts him with everyone else except his base. Trouble is, that base will go nuclear if he acknowledges it. (The thing is that logically, he could still assert it was wrong to go INTO Iraq, but that the Surge was the thing to do.) The "worked beyond wildest expectations" earlier helped, but McCain turned that against him well, noting that it was no surprise to HIM.
  • Probably no one else noticed this, but when he tried to excuse his failure to hold hearings on Afghanistan (a weakness in itself), he said that’s not the practice on the committee chaired by his veep candidate. That made me fully realize, in a way I hadn’t before, just how upside-down the ticket is in terms of qualifications — the number two guy on the ticket is the number one guy’s CHAIRMAN. If I had been McCain, I might have succumbed to the temptation to point out the irony.
  • This is a silly one, but the "professor" was much in evidence in his pedantic insistence on trying to pronounce foreign names and terms the way natives of those countries might, but doing it with such an obvious American accent (the bad guys in Afghanistan were the "Tollybon," said as only an English-shaped tongue could say it). Maybe you couldn’t hear it; it’s something from my childhood when I lived in South America and was bilingual — even though I can hardly speak it now, hearing other gringos try to be SO proper in their pronunciation and fail still grates on my ear.

Yeah, I know — I gave McCain more strengths, and Obama more weaknesses. But each item does not have equal value, and overall, I think they came out even. That’s bad news for McCain, because the subject of most of the debate was his personal area of strength, and he needed to clearly win this one.

I don’t think he did that, but then I can’t speak for all independent voters.

So I guess we’ll have a debate now

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If one views McCain’s decision to suspend campaigning as a campaign gambit — and it’s hard, in this cynical world, to see it outside that context — it appears to be one that paid off.

Congress reaches a deal, he appears at the White House with an air of having gotten the job done (WITH Obama, thereby emphasizing bipartisanship over grubbing for personal electoral advantage), and he goes ahead with the debate Friday night, having made the gesture to put the nation’s business first, yet not having the painful choice of either a) blinking first and showing up without a deal on the bailout or b) being the cause of the absurd spectacle of Obama standing there facing an empty lectern.

If nothing else, he’s shifted the focus to himself more than otherwise — which can easily work against him still, of course. Instead of "leader who puts the country ahead of politicking" he can look like "reckless gambler who will risk it all on a throw of the dice."

But we’ll see. Things are moving fast today.

Bipartisan bailout deal reached

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Maybe this did turn out to be our fiscal 9/11, pulling Democrats and Republicans together to act in the interests of the country rather than their respective parties. If so, kudos all around. We’ll no more later in the day after the historic confab at the White House with congressional leaders and both presidential candidates.

For now, here’s what The Wall Street Journal is reporting.

Here’s The New York Times version.

And here’s AP’s:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Key Republicans and Democrats reported agreement Thursday on an outline for a historic $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, but there was still resistance from rank-and-file House Republicans despite warnings of an impending panic.

"I now expect we will, indeed, have a plan that can pass the House, pass the Senate, be signed by the president and bring a sense of certainty to this crisis that is sill roiling in the market," Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, said as members of both parties emerged from a two-hour negotiating session.

Negotiators planned to present the outline at a White House meeting later Thursday with President Bush and the rivals to replace him, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barrack Obama.

"We’re very confident that we can act expeditiously," said Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., the Banking Committee chairman.

Not everyone in the closed-door talks was as optimistic. Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama, the only House Republican in the bargaining meeting, stopped short of saying he agreed with the other lawmakers on an imminent deal.

"There was progress today," said Bachus, the senior Republican on the House Financial Services panel.

Later, he issued a statement saying he was not empowered to strike any deals and there was "no agreement other than to continue discussions."

Both houses’ Republican leaders, Rep. John Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell, also issued statements saying there was no agreement.

Still, the White House called the announcement "a good sign that progress is being made."

"We’ll want to hear from (Treasury) Secretary (Henry) Paulson and take a look at the details. We look forward to a good discussion at the meeting this afternoon," said Tony Fratto, the deputy White House press secretary.

A Treasury spokeswoman said the proposal was being reviewed there.

On Wall Street, stock prices were up late in the trading day, but not by as much as earlier in the day.

The core of the plan proposed by the administration just a few days ago envisions the government buying up sour assets of shaky financial firms in a bid to keep them from going under and to stave off a potentially severe recession.

Obama and McCain called for a bipartisan effort to deal with the crisis, little more than five weeks before national elections in which the economy has emerged as the dominant theme.

McCain on Wednesday asked Obama to agree to delay their first debate, scheduled for Friday, to deal with the meltdown. Obama said the debate should go ahead.

Congressional negotiators said Thursday there were few obstacles to a final agreement, although no details of an accord were immediately available.

"There really isn’t much of a deadlock to break," said Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

But there were fresh signs of trouble in the House Republican Caucus. A group of GOP lawmakers circulated an alternative designed to attract private money back into the credit markets with less government intrusion.

Under that proposal, the government would provide insurance to companies that agree to hold frozen assets, rather than purchase them directly as envisioned under the administration’s plan. The firms would have to pay insurance premiums to the Treasury Department for the coverage.

"The taxpayers haven’t done anything wrong," said Rep Eric Cantor, R-Va., adding that rather than require them to bear the cost of the bailout, the alternative "pretty much puts the burden on Wall Street over time."

Boehner, R-Ohio, the minority leader, was huddling with McCain on the rescue. When asked whether the GOP presidential nominee could corral restive Republicans to support the plan, Boehner said, "Who knows?"

Bush told the nation in a televised address Wednesday night that passage of the package his administration has proposed was urgently needed to calm the markets and restore confidence in the reeling financial system.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush’s agreement with Democrats on limiting pay for executives of bailed-out financial institutions and giving taxpayers an equity stake in the companies cleared a significant hurdle.

It was not immediately clear how lawmakers had resolved differences over how to phase in the unprecedented cost — a step demanded by Democrats and some Republicans who want stronger congressional control over the bailout — without spooking markets. The idea of letting the government take an ownership stake in troubled companies as part of the rescue, rather than just buying bad debt, also has been a topic of intense negotiation.

Frank told The Associated Press Thursday both elements would be included in the legislation.

Bush acknowledged Wednesday night that the bailout would be a "tough vote" for lawmakers. But he said failing to approve it would risk dire consequences for the economy and most Americans.

"Our entire economy is in danger," he said.

Should Friday’s debate be postponed?

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McCain wants to postpone Friday night’s debate until a bipartisan consensus can be reached on the bailout plan. Obama wants to go ahead. Both are meeting with President Bush Thursday.

Should they debate the next night? What do you think?

Here’s a story on the subject:

The economic crisis and raw politics threatened to derail the first presidential debate as John McCain challenged Barack Obama to delay Friday’s forum and unite to help Washington fix the financial mess. Obama rebuffed his GOP rival, saying the next president needs to "deal with more than one thing at once."

The White House rivals maneuvered Wednesday to claim the leadership role in resolving the economic turmoil that has overshadowed their campaign. Obama said he would proceed with his debate preparations while consulting with bailout negotiators and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. McCain said he would stop all advertising, fundraising and other campaign events and return to Washington and work for a bipartisan solution.

"It’s my belief that this is exactly the time when the American people need to hear from the person who, in approximately 40 days, will be responsible for dealing with this mess," Obama said at a news conference in Clearwater, Fla. "It’s going to be part of the president’s job to deal with more than one thing at once."

But McCain said they must focus on a bipartisan solution as the Bush administration’s $700 billion bailout proposal seemed headed for defeat. If not, McCain said ominously, credit will dry up, people will no longer be able to buy homes, life savings will be at stake and businesses will not have enough money to pay workers.

"It has become clear that no consensus has developed to support the administration’s proposal," McCain said. "I do not believe that the plan on the table will pass as it currently stands, and we are running out of time."

President Bush invited both candidates to the White House on Thursday, along with congressional leaders, in hopes of securing a bill to rescue the economy. Bush took the unusual step Wednesday night of calling Obama directly to invite him, White House press secretary Dana Perino said. An Obama spokesman said the senator would attend.

In a joint statement Wednesday night, the candidates said the country faces "a moment of economic crisis," and called for political unity to solve it because "the jobs, savings and the prosperity of the American people are at stake." Both said the Bush plan was "flawed."

"We cannot risk an economic catastrophe," they said. "Now is our chance to come together to prove that Washington is once again capable of leading this country."

Sen. Lindsey Graham, McCain’s representative in debate negotiations, said McCain will not attend the debate "unless there is an agreement that would provide a solution" to the financial crisis. Graham, R-S.C., told The Associated Press that the agreement would have to be publicly endorsed by Obama, McCain, the White House and congressional leaders, but not necessarily given final passage by the House and Senate.

Asked whether the debate could go forward if McCain doesn’t show, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said: "My sense is there’s going to be a stage, a moderator, an audience and at least one presidential candidate."

Beware excessive certainty about Wall Street crisis

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
We all have our ways of escaping when the world is too much with us. Some find that “reality” TV serves. Others have football. I’ve been rereading the seafaring novels of Patrick O’Brian.
    In the one I’m on now, there is an enduring image that has stuck with me this week: a frail wooden ship, its sails reefed to the minimum, riding an enormous swell in the chilly latitudes far south of the Cape of Good Hope. Each wave is higher than the masts, and the crew scrambles from moment to moment to keep from being overwhelmed by wind and water.
    Following the crisis on Wall Street has been like that, except that the ship’s crew could do something. Watching the unbelievably high waves of financial news breaking, I felt more like a passenger who doesn’t know port from starboard. I suspect I’m not alone in this.
    In fact, I know I’m not. What I’ve read in recent days has caused me to beware anyone who sounds too glibly sure about how we got where we are, and what we should do next.
    Early in the week, I was glib myself, on my blog. I complained mightily that my worst fears (first voiced in January) were being realized, that this would end up being an election about the economy. My whole career, I had considered a newspaper front page that led with economic news a dead giveaway that nothing interesting was happening in the world. But by the end of the week, the sheer scale of what was happening shut me up on that score.
    The Wall Street Journal played the turmoil on its turf across six columns at the top of the front page, five days in a row. Rupert Murdoch or no Rupert Murdoch, that just doesn’t happen. And a smaller headline on one of those same pages proclaimed the “Worst Crisis Since ’30s, With No End Yet in Sight.” A terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy in Yemen got pushed to an inside page, and not even I scoffed at the editors’ judgment.
    The Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson, usually a mortal enemy of hyperbole, wrote that “Wall Street as we know it is kaput.” I did not doubt him.
    The fall of giants of high finance, from Lehman Brothers to Merrill Lynch to AIG, seemed less significant than the fundamental, systemic changes that happened in reaction — reinforcing the metaphor of a deep ocean swell as opposed to mere whitecaps. The Federal Reserve teamed up with other nations’ central banks to “improve the liquidity conditions in global financial markets.” The U.S. Treasury secretary and chief of the Fed huddled repeatedly with other major players — in not only New York, but London, other foreign capitals and right up the road in Charlotte — to reshape the U.S. financial system.
    The phrase “on the fly” would appear in report after report, giving the impression of erstwhile Masters of the Universe scrambling like common sailors between the waves washing over the deck, desperately trying different combinations of sail and rudder.
    Amid all this, some pundits would air their erudition regarding such affairs, but what certainty they were able to muster seemed to arise from their own political prejudices. On the facing page you see that Paul Krugman notes with satisfaction that “much of Washington appears to have decided that government isn’t the problem, it’s the solution.” Mr. Krugman is a professor of economics at Princeton. But other smart people wrote the opposite. George Will grumbled about the rapid increase of “government entanglement with our less-and-less-private enterprise system,” and a member of the Journal’s editorial board flatly said, “Government largely created this mess.”
    Ignorant as I am, I strongly suspect that the best way through this storm will thoroughly please neither supply-siders nor the acolytes of John Maynard Keynes.
    So it is that, perhaps paradoxically, I was reassured to see just how uncertain the two candidates for president were in the face of this unexpected challenge.
    They, too, started the week glib. As late as Tuesday, John McCain was blithely expressing his opposition to the AIG buyout, and Barack Obama was responding with the usual comfort that Democrats feel with pocketbook issues, pontificating that “John McCain cannot be trusted to re-establish proper oversight of our financial markets for one simple reason: He has shown time and again that he does not believe in it.”
    But the next day, Sen. McCain more humbly acquiesced to the necessity of the bailout, saying “there are literally millions of people whose retirement, whose investment, whose insurance were at risk here.” On Friday, he tried to put his views in a coherent context with a speech to a Chamber of Commerce in Wisconsin, while Sen. Obama said his own more extended proposals would be forthcoming once he had met with his advisers later that day.
    In this kind of environment, with each news cycle bearing down on us like a wave that seemingly could, in Bob Dylan’s words, drown the whole world, I find greater comfort in such humble confusion than in the positive tones of those who are too sure of their analyses.
    As The New York Times noted, “The actions of both men captured how they were being forced to make policy proposals and pronouncements on the fly, from one campaign rally to another, as each day’s developments in the financial markets and in Washington were overtaken by new ones the following day.” The campaign had become an “audition for who could best handle a national economic emergency.”
    At some point we’re going to need some FDR-like self-assurance mixed with pragmatic solutions. And in this election that is suddenly about the economy, it’s unclear which candidate will pass that part of the audition.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Our fiscal 9/11?

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Remember when Democrats and Republicans stood on the Capitol steps and sang "God Bless America?" For a moment there, the Washington crowd was stunned by the attacks of 9/11 into forgetting their stupid partisan differences and remembering they were Americans. I made a passing reference to that in a column last week.

This NYT story describes a moment last night when the shock and awe of the scope of this mounting financial crisis had a similar effect on members of Congress. It happened in a briefing Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson gave to congressional leaders:

“When you listened to him describe it you gulped," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.

As Senator Christopher J. Dodd,
Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban
Affairs Committee, put it Friday morning on the ABC program “Good
Morning America,” the congressional leaders were told “that we’re
literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial
system, with all the implications here at home and globally.”

Mr. Schumer added, “History was sort of hanging over it, like this was a moment.”

When Mr. Schumer described the meeting as “somber,” Mr. Dodd cut in.
“Somber doesn’t begin to justify the words,” he said. “We have never
heard language like this.”

“What you heard last evening,” he
added, “is one of those rare moments, certainly rare in my experience
here, is Democrats and Republicans deciding we need to work together
quickly.”

What an amazing time for a spirit of bipartisan cooperation to emerge — if that indeed happens (and if it doesn’t, we’re sunk). Now, on the eve of this too-close-to-call presidential election, the one I worried so much about in another column.

I certainly hope that happens. But you know what? As weird as you may think the fact that 9/11 made me (however briefly) optimistic about the future, here’s something you might find harder to fathom: I don’t feel that way this time. With the terror attacks of 9/11, I had very clear ideas of what I thought should happen next (short version: fully engage the world), and it was my belief that those things would happen that prompted my optimism.

Now, I’m at a loss. I don’t know what it is I want the government to coalesce around. Maybe Bush and Paulson are taking the right steps, but I don’t know. To me, a financial mess of this magnitude is more perplexing than terrorist attacks. Not as immediately horrible, but less understandable. And that leaves me uneasy.

Also, the promise of bipartisanship seems shakier here. There is a history of partisans setting aside differences in response to an external threat. But many politicians cut their teeth demagoging economic issues, and happily drawing sharp ideological distinctions about them.

But I hope the potential described above is realized. As uncertain as I am about the way forward, I would feel much better if we’d drop the party games and face it together. That would help a great deal.

Half a trillion? Whoa! That’s more than I make in a YEAR

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OK, I realize that’s an old joke, but I just basically wanted to give y’all a post on which to react to the Bush administration’s proposal for dealing with the crisis on Wall Street:

WASHINGTON — Struggling to stave off financial catastrophe, the Bush administration on Friday laid out a radical bailout plan with a jaw-dropping price tag — a takeover of a half-trillion dollars or more in worthless mortgages and other bad debt held by tottering institutions.

Relieved investors sent stocks soaring on Wall Street and around the globe. The Dow-Jones industrials average rose 368 points after surging 410 points the day before on rumors the federal action was afoot.

A grim-faced President Bush acknowledged risks to taxpayers in what would be the most sweeping government intervention to rescue failing financial institutions since the Great Depression. But he declared, "The risk of not acting would be far higher."

Here are several versions of the story:

I’m still scrambling here to get the weekend editorial and op-ed pages out, but in the meantime, what do y’all think? The market seems to like it, but those folks are easily excited…

DOH! We forgot the ‘national will’ part!

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Following up on my call earlier to Dave looking for resources about DIME, he e-mailed me something he got from a friend who teaches at West Point:

DIME is a list of the instruments of national power:

The ability of the United States to achieve its national
strategic objectives is dependent on the effectiveness of the US Government
(USG) in employing the instruments of national power. These instruments of
national power (diplomatic, informational, military, and economic), are normally
coordinated by the appropriate governmental officials, often with National
Security Council (NSC) direction. They are the tools the United States uses to
apply its sources of power, including its culture, human potential, industry,
science and technology, academic institutions, geography, and national
will.

To which I responded,

National will! We forgot about national will! DOH! That’s the problem!…

And kidding aside, that IS the problem. As long as our conversations about strategy is grounded in the kind of political vocabulary we’ve heard for the last few years — mostly based either in trying to appeal to bases or win elections — we’re not going to be able to assemble the national will to focus all of our resources toward international goals that are beneficial not only to this country, but to the world at large.

Where George W. Bush has failed, more than in any other way, is in assembling that national will and leading us to act upon it.

Unfortunately, so far I haven’t seen either McCain or Obama state a whole strategy that the nation can get behind — that is, something that goes beyond the either-or oversimplification of "soft power vs. hard power." If they did it and I missed it, I’d appreciate a heads-up.