From The Baltimore Sun
By Cynthia Tucker

“The Puritan ethos (save first and enjoy later) was not abandoned. It was merely overwhelmed by the massive power of modern merchandising.”

“The Affluent Society,” John Kenneth Galbraith

Henry Ford’s genius lay not just in his technological innovations, such as the modern assembly line, but also in his social wisdom, which led him to pay his workers $5 a day. That doubled the prevailing wage for 1914 and drew the best workers to his factories. The money also allowed those workers to buy the automobiles they made.

For decades, America’s consumer-driven economy purred along on the fuel of good paychecks to regular Joes. Automotive workers could buy Fairlanes and Mustangs, just as Whirlpool’s machinists could buy refrigerators and dishwashers.

But wage earners began to fall behind in the 1970s. As productivity and corporate profits soared - so the rich got richer - pay didn’t keep pace with inflation. Today’s corporate titans have discarded Ford’s example of helping workers to prosper.

So what happens when wages flatten and good-paying jobs disappear?

Consumers buy on credit. It’s no wonder that consumer debt has soared to a staggering $2.5 trillion. Between mortgages, second mortgages and credit cards, many families, especially struggling wage earners, are barely getting by. More than a third of those carrying credit card balances of $10,000 or more earn less than $50,000 a year.

Read more Affluent Society

From The LA Times
By Ezra Klein

Tuesday’s debate may have starred Barack Obama and John McCain, but it wasn’t really about them. Rather, it was about an odd and extremely powerful creature in American electoral politics: the Undecided Voter. It was the Undecided Voter whom Gallup asked to submit the questions. It was the Undecided Voter who filled the audience. It was the Undecided Voter who turned the dials controlling CBS’ squiggly reaction lines and recorded his (or her) responses for CBS’ postelection survey.

It’s a bit odd that we give the Undecided Voter such a privileged place in American elections. Because from a civic standpoint, few creatures are as contemptible. This election has dominated every form of American news media for the better part of two years. Newspapers, magazines, networks, cable, radio, blogs, people on street corners with signs — it’s really been rather hard to miss. Further, it pits two extremely different candidates against each other. Whether your metric is age, ideology, temperament, race, funding sources, healthcare plans or Iraq strategies, it would be hard to imagine two men presenting a starker contrast.

But despite this, the Undecided Voter wakes up each morning and says, in effect, “I dunno.” And the political system panders to him. Undecided voters are believed to be the decisive slice of the American electorate, so they get the debates and the ads and the focus groups (assuming, that is, that they live in a battleground state).

Political-science research on undecided voters remains a bit sparse, in part because it’s hard to pin down who, exactly, they are. It’s not a static population. At least initially, we’re all undecided voters. More of us are undecided in May than in October.

And even now, when most of us have settled into our preferences, change remains possible. If Obama personally collars Osama bin Laden during a fact-finding trip in Afghanistan, a lot of die-hard Republicans will switch their vote. Similarly, if McCain emerges from one of his 12 garages and explains that he was doing some tinkering and came up with a cheap, clean, renewable, plentiful energy source, the polls will swing.

Read more Undecided

From The NY Times
By Frank Rich

If you think way back to the start of this marathon campaign, back when it seemed preposterous that any black man could be a serious presidential contender, then you remember the biggest fear about Barack Obama: a crazy person might take a shot at him.

Some voters told reporters that they didn’t want Obama to run, let alone win, should his very presence unleash the demons who have stalked America from Lincoln to King. After consultation with Congress, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, gave Obama a Secret Service detail earlier than any presidential candidate in our history — in May 2007, some eight months before the first Democratic primaries.

“I’ve got the best protection in the world, so stop worrying,” Obama reassured his supporters. Eventually the country got conditioned to his appearing in large arenas without incident (though I confess that the first loud burst of fireworks at the end of his convention stadium speech gave me a start). In America, nothing does succeed like success. The fear receded.

Until now. At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.

Read more Race

From The Seattle PI
By Margaret Carlson

In campaigns as in life, traits that are liabilities when you’re young can turn into major assets later on.

The chess-club member who flunked gym or the girl who doesn’t give a thought to her wardrobe come up winners as adults because of the very qualities that once caused them pain: The clumsy dweeb starts a high-tech company. Plain Jane becomes a federal judge.

Early in his campaign, Barack Obama’s most discussed weakness was a detached, even aloof manner depicted as proof of elitism. When Hillary Clinton morphed into a fiery populist downing shots and beers and gobbling the local fare, I urged him to get with the people. Hoist a pint. Have a doughnut, at least. He didn’t heed my advice.

As the 2008 campaign closes and the U.S. finds itself battered by an economic storm, Obama’s unflappable demeanor has a new name. It’s called a presidential temperament.

It’s come in handy during the financial crisis, particularly when John McCain “suspended” his campaign, jeopardizing their first debate, saying he didn’t want to phone in his advice. Then he spent the weekend at his Arlington, Va., headquarters phoning members of Congress.

Obama quietly huddled with former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and billionaire investor Warren Buffett. He refused to cancel the debate on a Friday night, with markets and Congress closed. McCain showed up.

That same temperament prevailed again at last week’s debate. Obama was steady, and McCain tried to be. He talked less about being a “maverick” (condolences to those at home playing the drinking game) in favor of being “a cool hand on the tiller” in rough seas.

Read more Presidential

From The Times UK
By Andrew Sullivan

His calm is almost unnatural. I’ve been following Barack Obama closely now for two years and I’ve never seen him or even heard of him losing his temper. The worst I’ve seen was a little irritation at a fund-raiser a year and a half ago where some volunteers backstage were making so much noise that he couldn’t think straight. There was a little edge in his voice as he asked them to quieten down.

During some of the tensest moments in the primary campaign, he would sometimes go into a hotel room alone for a few minutes, compose himself and then come back out. Hillary Clinton cried in public. Bill Clinton got red in the face and made some borderline racist remarks. John McCain picked Sarah Palin, called Obama Britney Spears, suspended his campaign in the middle of a financial panic, unveiled a completely loopy mortgage bailout scheme on live television last week and explodes on cue like a microwaved bag of popcorn.

Obama? He lollops along with a calm smile and a physical fluency that is hard to mock or copy. If he were a boxer, he’d be the kind who keeps moving but hangs back. He waits for his opponents to take a swing, ducks and comes back into the game. He sticks to a game plan and rarely deviates. And he waits for his opponent to make an error. Watching his autumn fight with McCain reminds me of the Wile E Coyote and Road Runner cartoons. Every elaborate attempt to blow Obama up leaves his opponents with sooty faces and a trail of smoke rising from the tops of their heads.

Remember the Clintons? They assumed this young liberal black man from Chicago was unelectable. They assembled their massive armoury, cashed in their chits and awaited the victory parade. Obama quietly but ruthlessly followed a stealth caucus and primary campaign that brilliantly leveraged Hillary’s inevitability against her. He made the first potential woman president look like the past. By the beginning of March, she was toast, although it took her a few more months to come to terms with it.

Read more Beep Beep

From The Seattle Times
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

Maybe you remember “Dave.”

It was a 1993 movie starring Kevin Kline as Dave Kovic, an everyday guy who happens to be a dead ringer for the president. When the chief executive is stricken, his aides secretly recruit Dave to fill in for him. Problem is, Dave quickly begins to lose himself in the role. There’s a wonderful scene where, trying to find money in the federal budget to fund a homeless shelter, Dave turns to his friend Murray, an accountant, for help.

“Who does these books?” asks Murray after taking an adding machine to the budget. “If I ran my business this way, I’d be out of business.”

Like “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” in 1939, the central conceit of “Dave” is that what Washington needs is a jolt of reality from everyday people. As a movie, that’s a charming idea. As real life, it has proved frightening and bizarre.

But we will talk more about Sarah Palin in a moment.

First, let’s concede the obvious: Every politician wants to be seen as Everyman or woman. That’s why every primary season brings the curious sight of millionaires in plaid shirts wandering through county fairs eating fried things on sticks. It’s why Hillary Clinton hit that bar and Barack Obama went bowling, badly.

Read more Wink

From The Boston Globe
By Robert L. Turner

The artifact pictured here carries a political punch still being felt today. The few dark squiggles represent Michael S. Dukakis, the Democratic candidate for president in 1988. What makes the poster relevant 20 years later is its message, conveyed with extreme brevity: With a simple drawing and three words, it makes the following argument: “Elect George H. W. Bush president because . . . because he’s not Dukakis.”

This strategy is now common in national campaigns, mainly because it often works on Election Day.

A central goal of both the McCain and Obama campaigns is to make the opponent unelectable. John McCain and his supporters say Barack Obama is too liberal, too untested, too closely tied to radical friends, and not patriotic enough to even deserve consideration. Obama and his supporters say McCain is too old, too temperamental, too quick on the trigger, and too much like President Bush to merit a vote.

Effective as it can be, this strategy exacts a heavy cost. The mud inevitably tarnishes politics generally, increasing public cynicism. And since such attacks are now always answered in kind, whichever candidate wins takes office with deep bruises.

A third cost is less recognized but just as real. The attacker focuses so intently on the opponent that he offers no detailed platform that might make him the focus of campaign debate. So as president he has no mandate to draw on and rarely achieves much.

Bush the elder is a case in point. He offered scant substance to voters in 1988, accomplished little, apart from the Gulf War, and lost reelection to Bill Clinton, who had a fatter agenda.

Read more Going Negative

From AlterNet
By Doug Kreeger

Now that Sarah Palin is playing the role of pit-bull with lipstick, it has taken all the fun out of this election. I was experiencing endorphin overload as she entertained us the first few weeks after she got the nod. While the far right wing was enjoying her moment in the spotlight, most others of us have turned to her for shameless comic relief. But, now, as she has been repackaged as an attack dog, it is not so easy just to laugh her off.

Here we are nearing the Eleventh Hour in what many term the “most important election in generations.” With the world crumbling by the nanosecond, the new Sarah is all about getting boos from the audience against Obama, The New York Times and the so-called “East Coast elite.” What kind of fun is that? Not to mention, it’s also clear she doesn’t have a clue that the oceans are risin’ and the skies are fallin’, to use the Palinese dialect. Am I sick to wish she’d just call it a day and audition for a fictional Fox show called “The Hockey Mom?”

That might be funny until you stop and consider what is at stake. We are in the throes of the biggest collapse in the world’s economic system since the Great Depression. We now have the real possibility that the frozen credit markets will forever change the world. I guess those campaign slogans were right; this election is about change.

Now even laughing at Palin won’t be enough of an anti-depressant because millions of our fellow citizens actually think she is ready to be president. Wow — a person who just two months ago most of us had never heard of and who has now been dressed up and sold to the American public by the likes of Karl Rove. Forget the fictional Fox show, she has been thrust into the all-time best reality show ever conceived. While providing great material for Jon Stewart, David Letterman and Tina Fey, she’s serving the increasingly dangerous role of pandering to the audience at Fox News with her hate speech.

Read more Hate

From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

Michael Crowley illustrates, yet again, why The New Republic is beloved by the Right — eagerly currying favor with the Right is the magazine’s overarching, obsequious purpose — and has otherwise (with some rare exceptions) written itself into utter irrelevancy. Crowley denies that the ugly, anti-Obama lynch mob rage characterizing McCain/Palin rallies is “unique” or “of alarming proportion,” and instead argues that Democrats are being hypocrites by objecting, because some people on the left also said bad things about George Bush 2004:

Is the GOP Fury So Unique?

My friends and fellow prisoners, time for some straight talk: Politico has a good story today about Republican rage at the notion of an Obama presidency … . This is all nasty stuff. is it really unprecedented? A pitchfork rebellion of alarming proportions? I’m not so sure. Around this time four years ago Democrats raged furiously against an illegitimate, lying “war criminal.” Indeed some even called Bush a terrorist.

Yes, there’s probably a nativist strain here that makes this uglier than anything we saw in ‘04… . But I haven’t seen many examples of overt racism beyond the smears we’ve seen for months. (Indeed as Noam notes below, race has been somewhat surprisingly absent from ths campaign so far.)

Unfortunately, to some degree this seems to be what happens in American politics nowadays when one side is losing. No one wants to accept the possibility that they’ve been outplayed fair and square.

Obviously, every political movement — every group of human beings — will attract some crazed, imbalanced individuals. If all that were happening in this election were a few stray comments from the crowd or some anonymous Internet comments that were vicious or even overtly racist and violent, then Crowley’s point that there’s nothing unusual or particularly significant would at least be reasonable.

Read more Fury

From The NY Times
By Maureen Dowd

With modernity crumbling, our thoughts turn to antiquity.

The decline and fall of the American Empire echoes the experience of the Romans, who also tumbled into the trap of becoming overleveraged empire hussies.

As our sand-castle economy washes away under the tide of bad gambles and debts, this most self-indulgent society lurches toward stoicism (even bankrupt Iceland gives us the cold shoulder and turns to a solvent superpower). It’s going to require more than giving up constant infusions of stocks, Starbucks and Botox.

As Seneca, the Roman Stoic who advised treating the body “somewhat strictly,” wrote in a letter: “Avoid whatever is approved of by the mob, and things that are the gift of chance. Whenever circumstance brings some welcome thing your way, stop in suspicion and alarm …They are snares. … we think these things are ours when in fact it is we who are caught. That track leads to precipices; life on that giddy level ends in a fall.”

Read more Rome