Joe Conason

Touring America’s oil rigs and nuclear plants, John McCain sometimes sounds as if he will produce enough wind to power the nation all by himself. So strongly does his current rhetoric smell of methane, the gas emanating from manure, that he might even qualify for a renewable energy tax incentive.

The former straight talker, who could not help telling the truth, has found the voice of the demagogue within him. As Senator McCain seeks to exploit public anger over the price of gasoline, first with his dubious “gas tax holiday” and now with his campaign for offshore oil drilling, the thoughtful legislator who defied his own party on issues such as global warming and Alaskan oil leasing has been replaced by that much more familiar Congressional figure—a rented mouthpiece for the energy industry.  read more »

Barack Obama knows which countries border Iraq; he understands the difference between Shia and Sunni; and he is probably aware that Czechoslovakia no longer exists—but as John McCain complains, the young senator has “no military experience whatsoever.” Indeed, like both of the last two presidents, Mr. Obama possesses scant credentials in national security and foreign policy.

Why, then, does he appear increasingly plausible as the next president? Assurance, grace, and mastery of the facts have helped to lift his stature, as did his daring decision to venture abroad, directly challenging his older opponent’s perceived strength. But granting his talent and initiative, the strongest argument for the Democrat is the weak performance of the Republican regime’s vaunted “grown-ups,” including Mr.  read more »

An expression of outrage is the highest compliment that politicians can bestow upon a satirist. So when spokesmen for Barack Obama and John McCain echo each other and many another stuffed shirt in complaining about the current cover of The New Yorker, the magazine’s editors and cartoonist Barry Blitt should accept such remarks in precisely that spirit.

From Mark Twain to Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, there have always been people who didn’t get it—or worried about the damage that would ensue when other people didn’t get it. Today in America, despite the rising influence of The Daily Show and The Onion, it can be hazardous to be too hip for the room.  read more »

Despite all the feigned outrage fanned by the mainstream media and the right-wing noisemakers, Wesley Clark—retired four-star general, former Supreme Commander of NATO, wounded and highly decorated veteran of ground combat in Vietnam, and a military man to his core—assuredly did not denigrate the war record of John McCain when he talked about the Republican candidate on television last Sunday.

Instead, perhaps naïvely, General Clark stated a very simple fact. Mr. McCain’s service in Vietnam doesn’t prove his aptitude or competence to serve in the nation’s highest office. Or as he told Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer on CBS: “I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.  read more »

Precisely on schedule, the usual assortment of right-wing operatives is preparing its expected assault on the Democratic presidential nominee. While this unwholesome phase of the election cycle is known universally as “Swift-boating”—named after the defamatory media blitz against John Kerry four years ago—the style and some of the personnel date back at least two decades. So does the winking charade of separation between the official Republican presidential campaign and the dirty business conducted on its behalf.

The only notable difference this year is that neither the money nor the message has crystallized yet behind any “independent” effort to destroy the candidacy of Barack Obama.  read more »

Once upon a time, there was a fiscally and socially responsible senator named John McCain. Despite his presidential ambitions, the Republican from Arizona spoke out against the economic royalism of his party’s leadership in the White House and Congress, and simply said no.

He rejected the Bush tax cuts in 2001 because they provided an unearned bonanza for America’s wealthiest citizens while giving a pittance to the middle class and nothing to the working poor. To him, as a long-standing enemy of waste and profligacy, these proposals were not only unfair but also unwise.

“I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief,” he said, joining courageously with Lincoln Chafee, then a senator from Rhode Island, as one of two Republicans who dared to cast such a crucial vote against president and party.  read more »

To his credit, John McCain has invited Barack Obama to join him in a national “town hall” tour over the coming months, without the unneeded intrusion of celebrity journalists, network extravaganzas and all of their irrelevant impertinence. The Arizona Republican insists that he wants a serious debate over the competing ideas and visions of the two parties, rather than the usual petty focus on process issues and gotcha questions.

After so many election cycles dominated by race-baiting, panty-raiding and swift-boating, voters might feel reassured by serious discussion of real issues. On no issue is such frank partisan discussion more urgent than the economy, as the numbers plunge downward along with national and world confidence.

Despite Mr. McCain’s widely quoted confession that he doesn’t know much about economics, the conceit of his party has long been that only conservatives understand how the world works—and that only cutting taxes on the wealthy and removing regulations from business can encourage growth, especially in recessionary periods.

Many American voters used to accept those simplistic nostrums as received truth, but perhaps it is time to reexamine them in the light of past history and present failures. When it is Mr. Obama’s turn to speak in the coming debates, he may wish to point out that the record of past economic performance by Republican politicians compares quite poorly with that of their Democratic rivals.

Take Phil Gramm, the former Texas Senator whose proud authorship of the Reagan tax cuts in 1981 was immediately followed by severe recession—and then by the largest peacetime tax increase in American history. Among Mr. Gramm’s final speeches in the Senate was an impassioned rant warning that the Clinton economic program would lead to disaster and higher deficits. He could not have been more wrong, of course, an embarrassing historical footnote that is only significant because he now serves as chief economic counselor to the McCain campaign.

Working alongside Mr. Gramm is Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist who claims with a straight face that President Reagan “cut taxes within the context of budget discipline and controls on spending.” That happy claim is utterly false, of course, belied by the enormous deficit that swiftly resulted in the tax increase, passed by the Senate Republicans and signed by the Republican president. The economy was still in deep trouble when Bill Clinton entered the White House after more than a decade of Republican rule.

Rather than merely score easy debating points off Mr. McCain and his ill-chosen advisers, Mr. Obama could speak more broadly about the stagnation and waste that have resulted from Republican economic policy—and how unfair policy undermines growth. Indeed, he shouldn’t hesitate to pillory conservative policymakers for incompetence and irresponsibility.

But what Mr. Obama ought to emphasize, consistent with his positive and uplifting appeal, is the excellent economic record of his Democratic forebears during the past century or so. As stewards of the economy, they have consistently outpaced the Republicans on every important measure, from stock market performance to gross domestic product to job creation to disposable income.

The Democrats have always been better at reducing poverty and increasing wages, which may not surprise anyone. But they have also proved superior at keeping inflation low, reducing budget deficits and restraining federal spending. After the scandalous budgeting of the Republican Congress and the Bush administration, perhaps nobody will find those statistics surprising, either.

The Obama advisers reflect a long-standing Democratic consensus, with their commitment to universal health care, Social Security, and fiscal stimulus balanced by budgetary responsibility and tax equity. They understand that fairness is the fastest path to renewed, sustainable growth.

As for Mr. McCain, who dissented from G.O.P. orthodoxy by voting against the Bush tax cuts in 2001, he recants that heresy now. He once understood that our system cannot be entrusted to the unregulated avarice of predators like his old pal Charles Keating, symbol of the savings-and-loan debacle. But now he parrots the free-market fundamentalism that led to the S&L crisis back then, and to the subprime mortgage disaster today. He proposes the same panaceas he used to deride.

So let’s have a freewheeling debate about how to revitalize the economy and the nation. Let’s hear Mr. McCain defend the discredited conventional wisdom of the right, and Mr. Obama explain the achievements of the liberal past and the promise of the progressive future. It is hard to imagine a clearer choice.

jconason@observer.com

The selection of a vice president is not only an exercise in political handicapping but a national rite of statecraft. Candidates, advisers, pundits and assorted experts try to calculate the ethnic, geographic, gender and ideological characteristics of potential running mates, but what this choice actually reveals is the character of a presidential nominee.

For Barack Obama, the choice of a vice president is a test of his self-confidence and his vaunted judgment. Should he seek to mollify the disappointed Clinton supporters, especially among his party’s women? Or should he try to balance his own political weaknesses with somebody else’s strengths? Will he attempt to win a region with his choice, or even one crucial state?

For John McCain, this decision will reflect the character issue that is now at the center of his campaign. Should he try to motivate the sullen base of the Republican Party by picking a right-wing hard-liner? Or should he renew his appeal to independents and even Democrats with a fresh-faced reformer? Can he strike deep into the opposition by choosing a female or minority candidate (or both)?

For either candidate, the selection process may be complicated by extraneous considerations. Suffering under a financial disadvantage, for example, the Republican campaign could be tempted by the likes of Mitt Romney, whose willingness to spend his own millions on negative ads certainly impressed Mr. McCain during the primaries. It is hard to imagine any other reason why the straight talker would tap a politician he so ardently despises.

Meanwhile certain leaders of the religious right are openly promoting the candidacy of Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and extinguished fad of the early primaries. Personable as he is, Huck nevertheless emphasizes the Republican extremism that is now out of favor with most American voters. He also talks too much and says stupid things about shooting people.

So perhaps Mr. McCain, who will turn 72 just before his party’s convention and looks even older, would do better with a young conservative governor like Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota or Bobby Jindal of Louisiana. The only problem with the youth gambit is that a political newcomer on the ticket would undermine his most compelling argument against Mr. Obama.

But if Mr. McCain confronts quandaries, those faced by his rival are just as difficult. First, Mr. Obama must engage in a complex and challenging dance with Hillary Clinton, according her appropriate respect without allowing her to dominate the process. Current polling data indicates that she would be an important asset to the Democratic ticket—if she wants the second spot and if she and Mr. Obama can truly imagine working together in the White House (with her husband somewhere in the background).

Should that seem impossible to Mr. Obama, he remains obliged to consider the disappointment of women who backed Mrs. Clinton as their gender’s great hope. It will be hard for them to accept that progress toward equality is a zero-sum game in this election cycle. Among the female officials of rank and merit are Governor Janet Napolitano of Arizona and Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas. Both endorsed Mr. Obama, but neither possesses the national security experience that he may regard as his ticket’s most pressing need. Ranking women who do, such as Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Jane Harman, both California Democrats, differ substantially with him on important foreign-policy issues.

Democrats with the strongest military credentials include Senator James Webb, the former Reagan Navy secretary who just might capture the electoral votes of his home state of Virginia, and Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who served as supreme commander of NATO during the Clinton administration. Both are decorated Vietnam veterans.

What Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain should remember as they draw up their lists is that many if not all successful vice presidential nominees were chosen by instinct as much as by crass calculation. Bill Clinton chose Al Gore because he wanted to make a statement about generational change, but also because he thought they could govern well together. Al Gore chose Joe Lieberman to make a statement about Bill Clinton, a mistake he will always regret. George W. Bush chose Dick Cheney to buy himself a touch of badly needed gravitas. That choice didn’t help him win the 2000 election, which he actually lost—but Mr. Cheney certainly helped secure his legacy as one of the worst presidents in our history.

The lesson is to be bold but thoughtful—and above all, to treat the vice presidency as a national trust and not a campaign gimmick.

jconason@observer.com

When the Democratic Party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee meets on May 31 to determine the status of the votes cast in the Michigan and Florida primaries, its members should try to look past self-serving campaign arguments and silly attempts to save face by bumbling party leaders.

In the mind-numbing saga of the botched primary schedule, there is plenty of blame to be shared among all the participants, from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and their surrogates to Howard Dean and the party apparatus in Washington.  read more »

Disturbed by troubling connections and unflattering publicity, John McCain has just purged several prominent Washington lobbyists from his presidential campaign. Surely his intentions are laudable, but if Mr. McCain is consistent in ridding the campaign of such compromised people, he will find himself riding lonesome on the Straight Talk Express. That’s because nearly all of his advisers, fund-raisers and top staffers have worked on K Street, starting with his campaign manager, Rick Davis, and his senior adviser and spokesman, Charles Black.

From the beginning, the McCain team has been thoroughly infested with representatives of corporate special interests, from the campaign’s national co-chairs, finance chairs, policy and political directors, and deputies of all descriptions down to the chairman of “Young Professionals for McCain,” who just happens to lobby for Airbus, the European aviation firm that benefited from the Arizona senator’s long inquest against Boeing.

Perhaps the senator hasn’t been paying attention for the past few decades, for he somehow seems to have surrounded himself with exactly the kind of Washington hustlers he professes to despise. How this happened is a question that Mr. McCain must answer for himself. What must be truly impressive to anyone glancing over the résumés of Messrs. Davis and Black, as well as the lesser members of the McCain entourage, is their magnetic attraction for the most questionable clients in the world.

Consider Mr. Black, a longtime Republican operative whose lobbying activities first drew negative attention during the Reagan administration, when he represented such august figures as Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, and Angolan rebel Jonas Savimbi. Marcos and Mobutu were infamous despots with a penchant for looting their own nation’s economies as well as any American aid that came their way, presumably with Mr. Black’s assistance. The theft of taxpayer funds by those two crooks eventually mounted into the billions, and they savagely repressed democratic forces with U.S. arms. As for Savimbi, he was merely an authoritarian thug, a Maoist ideologue and, according to some reports, a sometime cannibal.

We can safely assume that Mr. Black never returned any of the stolen blood money that paid for his services. Recently, he has suggested that U.S. government support for those dictatorial regimes somehow justified his profiteering, as if he weren’t involved in shoring up that support.

Meanwhile, Mr. Davis was toiling in the Reagan White House as a cabinet functionary, where one of his jobs included liaison with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, site of a major domestic looting scandal during those years. When he testified about his role in those events, his recollections of the influence peddling that had given housing contracts to well-connected Republicans were dim at best. But when he left the public payroll, he landed at the lobbying firm of Paul Manafort, who had gotten one of the most profitable of the HUD sweetheart deals for a $30 million development in New Jersey.

Aside from the usual roster of deep-pocketed corporations paying to have their way with Congress, the White House and the federal agencies—which horrifies Mr. McCain, lest anybody forget—the McCain advisers have attracted a number of particularly noisome accounts.

For several years, Mr. Davis represented G-TECH, the lottery and gambling conglomerate that has been embroiled in bribery scandals in several countries, including the United States. During that same period, his firm also represented the government of Nigeria, among the most flamboyantly corrupt regimes in the world, at the time under the boot heel of the murderous General Sani Abacha.

More recently he has cultivated the business of Oleg Deripaska, the Russian mega-billionaire, who made his fortune by seizing control of Russia’s aluminum industry during the violent “Aluminum Wars.” That history earned him a reputation as an unscrupulous mafioso and put him on the State Department’s visa watch list until certain American lobbyists fixed the problem. According to The Washington Post, Mr. Davis arranged at least two meetings in Europe between Mr. Deripaska, a close ally of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, and Mr. McCain, a critic of Mr. Putin’s oligarchical and undemocratic government.

These episodes scarcely begin to describe the careers of Mr. Davis and his colleagues on the McCain team. They’ve put lipstick on a lot of pigs.

But the question is why, at this late date, Mr. McCain is pretending to be shocked by the “conflicts of interest” in which he stands neck deep, and why he dismisses four or five lobbyists while keeping dozens of others, including his top advisers, because they claim to be “retired” or on “leave of absence” from their business. He knows that a press release won’t change the habits of a lifetime in Washington’s corrupt corporate culture—but apparently he hopes we will think so.

Double standards are endemic in American journalism. But Cindy McCain, wife of the Republican presidential candidate, displayed poor taste in flaunting her family’s special immunity from press scrutiny. Declaring on NBC’s Today that she would “never” release her income tax returns even if she becomes first lady, the Arizona beer heiress showed no concern that she and her husband will have to meet the same tests as other would-be White House occupants—ever.

Unfortunately, the arrogance of Mrs. McCain is probably well founded.  read more »

In this protracted and often dispiriting prelude to the general election, few remarks have been as poorly chosen as Senator Hillary Clinton’s threat to “totally obliterate” Iran. What she obliterated with just those two words were her own boasts of superior diplomatic experience—and she managed at the same time to tar America’s international image with all the subtlety of the man she hopes to replace.

Context cannot excuse her, even though she uttered that gaffe in response to an intentionally provocative question: What would she do, as president, if the Iranian regime ever strikes Israel with nuclear weapons? First she could have noted that the question’s premise is wrong, at least according to the most recent National Intelligence Estimate, which found that Iran neither possesses nuclear arms nor is likely to acquire them anytime soon. Then she might have answered as all presidents (or aspiring presidents) should when asked about such hypothetical military scenarios: “Our adversaries know very well that we have the power and the resolve to respond if one of our closest allies is attacked.”

Alluding to the potential use of justified force is far smarter than blustering about an act of genocidal brutality. So why wasn’t that distinction obvious to Mrs. Clinton? There are only two likely reasons, neither of which reflects well on her.

It is possible that she believes martial bluster will make her sound more like John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate whose macabre refrain of “bomb, bomb Iran” still echoes around the world. It is also possible that she truly believes threats of genocide are the best deterrent to Iranian misbehavior, as she told George Stephanopoulos last Sunday on ABC’s This Week.

Instead of clarifying or muting her aggressive blunder, she reiterated it, leaving transcripts that can be stripped of all qualification to make her sound still more bloodthirsty. “I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran. And I want them to understand that. … I think we have to be very clear about what we would do.”

Of course, opportunism is the political offense Mrs. Clinton is most often charged with. Should she ever return to the White House, we will probably be more secure and prosperous, if her belligerence toward Iran is mere campaign posturing. On other occasions she has advocated greater engagement with Iran, and that is certainly the view of her wisest advisers, so perhaps this is all wind without substance.

But that again raises the question of how far she will go to win, regardless of the damage she inflicts upon herself, her party and even her nation’s interests. Her remarks gave Tehran an easy chance to seize the moral initiative, which they instantly exploited by denouncing Mrs. Clinton’s comments in a public letter to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon as “provocative, unwarranted and irresponsible” and a violation of the U.N. Charter.

Evidently, the Iranian complaint won at least a modicum of sympathy, because the secretary general’s spokesman later said that if Mrs. Clinton “becomes president and she keeps saying that, then we’ll have to react.”

Were we not so inured to the most savage rhetoric by now, it might be considered ironic for a presidential candidate to endorse such a monumental crime against humanity in defense of the Jewish state. Does Mrs. Clinton not understand the difference between the mullahs’ regime and the people of Iran? Does her notion of military strategy contemplate the incineration of millions of innocents?

And most pertinently, does she think her threats will convince the Iranians to empower the liberal reformers in Tehran rather than the reactionary extremists?

The Iran experts chosen by Mrs. Clinton to counsel her campaign think not. Their well-informed and not terribly surprising assessment is that when we talk about wiping out Iran, the mullahs feel a more urgent need for nuclear weapons (and a stronger impulse to drive us out of the region). She has brushed off their analysis, just as she disdains the consensus of economists against the gas-tax holiday advocated by her and Mr. McCain.

Voters who might consider supporting her have confronted this Clinton conundrum more than once this year. Does she believe what she is saying, or is she saying what she believes we want to hear? Which is worse?

As the Rev. Jeremiah Wright gleefully tours the airwaves, inflicting severe political damage with almost every utterance, he is proving that racism isn’t the only obstacle to a black president. That historic prize is almost within the grasp of one of the most talented politicians America has ever seen. Yet what seems most likely to frustrate Senator Barack Obama now is not white prejudice but the frivolity, egotism and pettiness of those who should be his most serious and dedicated supporters.

To criticize Mr. Wright is not to reject the black church, the speaking styles of black preachers, the aspirations of black children or the rhythms and tonalities of black music, as he seemed to suggest in his address to the N.A.A.C.P. last weekend. To reject his ideas about the origins of AIDS or the causes of 9/11 is not, as he puts it, to confuse “different” with “deficient.”  read more »

Nobody with a functioning memory should be too quick to condemn Jimmy Carter for daring to speak with the leadership of Hamas, as nearly everyone along the American political spectrum suddenly has felt obliged to do. From Condoleezza Rice and John McCain to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, along with every Congressional backbencher in both parties, expressions of disapproval have rained down upon the former president, who is old enough and tough enough to pursue his own beliefs to their logical conclusion.

“The United States is not going to deal with Hamas,” said the secretary of state, “and we had certainly told President Carter that we did not think meeting with Hamas was going to help.” The justification for that policy was explained helpfully by Senator Obama, whose willingness to meet with foreign adversaries does not extend to Hamas, at least not during the primary season. The Illinois senator “does not support negotiations with Hamas until they renounce terrorism, recognize Israel’s right to exist and abide by past agreements,” according to a spokesman for his presidential campaign.  read more »

It is hard to blame John McCain for mocking Barack Obama as an “elitist” following that silly remark about bitter folks who cling to guns and religion. Rarely does the Arizona senator—one of the wealthiest members of Washington’s most exclusive club—encounter such a tempting chance to masquerade as a populist.

Making the most of that opportunity, Mr. McCain, the elder statesman, delivered a brief history lecture to the young upstart from Illinois. “During the Great Depression,” he said in a statement released by his campaign, “with many millions of Americans out of work and the country suffering the worst economic crisis in our history, there rose from small towns, rural communities, inner cities, a generation of Americans who fought to save the world from despotism and mass murder, and came home to build the wealthiest, strongest and most generous nation on earth.  read more »

Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the American forces in Iraq, is more candid than his publicists in the media and on Capitol Hill. Unlike the senators and editorial writers who claim that the glorious “surge” should be hailed as one of the most successful military campaigns in history, he warns that the escalation’s achievements are mixed at best—or as he put it, progress on the ground is “uneven,” “fragile” and “reversible,” with “innumerable challenges” remaining to be addressed.

His caveats cannot dampen the enthusiasm of the politicians and pundits who would maintain the occupation of Iraq, and even expand our aggressive presence in the Mideast. Selling that policy requires propaganda proving that the surge is succeeding and that if we only stay long enough, spend enough money and sacrifice enough young men and women, then someday we will achieve a great victory. We’re “closer,” says the general, carefully.  read more »

The most puzzling aspect of John McCain’s political persona is his habitual attraction to George W. Bush’s bad ideas. Their shared enthusiasm for invading Iraq and then escalating the war is why “McSame” will soon become the new shorthand for the Arizona Republican, replacing “maverick”—but that isn’t the only reason. He doesn’t just endorse the disastrous foreign policy initiatives; he loves the failed domestic policy schemes, too.

Specifically Mr. McCain is a longtime supporter of President Bush’s Social Security privatization initiative, last seen descending into oblivion only months after its introduction in 2005. He played a cameo role in the promotion of that notion (which never became an actual plan or bill in Congress) when the White House trotted him for one of the President’s staged public “conversations” on the subject. Back then, his pleas for everyone to sit down and negotiate the surrender of Social Security to Wall Street were universally ignored, yet that scarcely seems to have discouraged him.

Actually, Mr. McCain supported Social Security privatization before it was uncool, when he first ran for president eight years ago. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that a proposal to divert a portion of payroll taxes to finance private accounts, like the Bush scheme, was “a centerpiece of a McCain presidential bid in 2000.” Both he and Mr. Bush have wanted to dismantle Social Security for many years, in fact, and he has indicated that will be an important goal for a McCain presidency.

Sensibly enough, however, his advisers are trying to mute such themes in his campaign, knowing that privatization is extremely unpopular. They may have noticed that $50 million worth of advertising and promotion didn’t work three years ago. They may also have noticed that their candidate is poorly equipped to discuss the issue. As he once confessed, “the issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should.” So on the McCain campaign web site, the section concerning Social Security merely suggested that he would “supplement” the existing system with personal investment accounts – a suggestion that is entirely different from the more radical kind of privatization he has supported in the past.

But when the Wall Street Journal inquired about the discrepancy between his website and his previous statements, the candidate declared that his own position has never changed.

“I’m totally in favor of personal savings accounts,” he said. “As part of Social Security reform, I believe that private savings accounts are a part of it—along the lines that President Bush proposed.” (The other “parts” would include sharp benefit cuts, if the Senator’s past votes and statements provide any guide to future policy.) “I’ll correct any policy paper that I’ve put out that might intimate that personal savings accounts are not a very important factor,” he vowed.

Perhaps the old “straight talker” was simply saying what he thought would please powerful readers of the Journal, a newspaper whose editorial page avidly supports privatized accounts. Privatization is still not emphasized on the McCain web site, however, to say the least. He doesn’t utter a word about private accounts in a video on the site titled “Social Security.”

Instead, Mr. McCain pledges in that video to seek the same kind of solution achieved by President Ronald Reagan and the late House Speaker Tip O’Neill more than two decades ago. Following the advice of a commission headed by Alan Greenspan, who has since come and gone as Federal Reserve chairman, the President and the Democratic Congressional leadership agreed to bolster the system with new revenues and minor benefit changes. Although Reagan and Greenspan had long disparaged Social Security, they didn’t broach the topic of privatization.

Invoking the once-magical names of Reagan and Greenspan may work well on Youtube, particularly among the more gullible segments of the voting public. Between his remarks to the Journal and his video statement, it isn’t easy to determine whether he means to preserve, reform, or destroy Social Security, but the safest assumption is that he will pursue the same objectives that President Bush was forced to abandon.

As one of the wealthiest men in the Senate, thanks to the highly profitable liquor company bequeathed to him and his wife years ago, Mr. McCain faces no economic difficulty. He never has to worry about how he will afford retirement or the value of his assets, which is why risky schemes like privatization look so brilliant to him. But in the coming campaign, he may find that working families have no desire to turn Social Security over to the same companies now seeking bailouts from the federal government -- or to the politicians who would enact that bankers’ daydream.

For many years, Robert Morgenthau has warned America that the nexus of capitalism and criminality poses a serious threat to our prosperity, security and growth. Now in the wake of the collapse of Bear Stearns, which pushed global markets still closer to the brink, perhaps the nation will listen to the Manhattan district attorney, whose scrutinizing gaze is fixed on targets well beyond New York.

As a legendary prosecutor of international financial crime, Mr. Morgenthau has long kept a watchful eye on the buccaneering crew at Bear, the firm that now symbolizes the worst in amoral capital. Its executives were notorious for testing the limits of the law, by sheltering shady stock promoters and bucket-shop brokerages and by swelling the assets of its hedge funds with dubious mortgage-backed assets.  read more »

“Well, that’s history. That’s the past. That’s talking about what happened before. What we should be talking about is what we’re going to do now.”

The man who spoke those words was Senator John McCain, and the subject was the Iraq war and its origins in official falsehood, strategic error and wishful thinking. Expect to hear him repeat those same dismissive phrases again and again as the presidential campaign unfolds.

Understandably, the presumptive Republican nominee prefers to avoid examining how our finest young people and vast amounts of our national treasure came to be squandered in that desert, since he was among the war’s most excited advocates.

There were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq (as some of us were not surprised to learn), and in particular no nuclear weapons under construction, as advertised. There were no significant connections between Al Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein (as the Pentagon reaffirmed in a recent intelligence analysis). There was no legal basis for an invasion. There was no population inviting us to occupy their country as liberators.

Yes, it’s all “history,” or at least it will be someday, and the historians will properly record Mr. McCain’s role in the fiasco with all due asperity. But on the fifth anniversary of the war, it is a little too easy to dismiss everything that led us to this point as “what happened before.”

With the Arizona senator fresh from a Congressional trip to Baghdad, where he preened for the photo ops along with two of his campaign co-chairs, Senator Joseph Lieberman and Senator Lindsey Graham, this is certainly an appropriate moment to evaluate the judgment of the politicians who have promoted the whole enterprise, and the consequences of their decision.

How mistaken were the war’s optimistic promoters in 2003? The official line on the expected cost of rebuilding Iraq after ousting Saddam was just under $2 billion, according to testimony provided by Bush administration officials. That estimate did not include the likelihood, according to Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense, that Iraq’s oil reserves would cover the entire cost of invasion, occupation and reconstruction. Five years later, the estimated cost of the war to American taxpayers is well over $2 trillion, including the care we must provide for wounded Americans over the next few decades. Much of the Iraqi oil, whose production remains sporadic, is being stolen and smuggled away.

The difference between an estimate of $2 billion and a cost of $2 trillion could be considered a significant miscalculation, even in a Republican government.

Yet those figures don’t quite reckon with the real costs, which should include the rise in the price of oil from around $36 a barrel in March 2003 to well over $100 a barrel this month. Some economists go further, blaming the subprime mortgage collapse—and the ensuing deluge of bad paper that may capsize the world economy—on the effects of the war.

What did we get for all our money and blood? What diplomatic and strategic achievements can we attribute to the war? The conflict over Israel and Palestine has grown more intractable, with the rising influence of Hamas and Hezbollah. The influence of Iran, an avowed enemy of the United States, has risen across the region and penetrated deep into Iraq, where our occupation props up Tehran’s allies. The United States military has been badly depleted and demoralized, while our global prestige has dropped.

Still, Mr. McCain tells us—and reportedly assured the Iraqi prime minister—of his intentions if he is elected president. “What we’re going to do now is continue this strategy,” he said, “which is succeeding in Iraq, and we are carrying out the goals of the surge.”

Actually, the aim of last year’s troop escalation was to create sufficient stability in Iraq to permit the Sunni, Shia, Kurdish and other political leaders to consolidate their government, provide decent public services and begin reconciliation. General David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces there, has acknowledged that the progress toward those objectives is far from satisfactory. Based on the originally stated purpose of the “surge,” it isn’t succeeding. Predictably, the level of violence in Iraq is again rising, with the daily death toll in March so far doubled from the low point in January.

It is telling when a presidential candidate speaks so dismissively of history and urges us to ignore “what happened before.” In this instance, it is a sign of bad faith and worse judgment.

When Eliot Spitzer stood before the stunned press corps on Monday to make a brief apology for his misconduct, he spoke of “real change,” of trying to “uphold a vision of progressive politics that would rebuild New York and create opportunity for all,” of “ideas and the public good.” If the governor actually believes in any of those things, he will be the former governor by the time these words appear in print (or as soon as he can exchange his resignation for a favorable plea bargain, whichever comes first).

It is painful to watch the fall of Mr. Spitzer because the potential he represented was once so inspiring. Blessed with a privileged upbringing, he seemed to feel a duty to serve. Armed with the confidence of the elite achiever, he dared to challenge the powerful, including major business interests and right-wing ideologues, in defense of the public interest. Lionized by voters who sent him to Albany with a mandate, he invited comparison with great New Yorkers who changed the nation during the past century, such as Louis D. Brandeis and the Roosevelts, Theodore and Franklin.  read more »

Whatever their true private beliefs, presidential candidates in America are constantly required to provide proofs of their faith, often through their connections with various religious figures. Benedictions from the pulpit can bestow an aura of righteousness—except, of course, when the pastor or minister is a disreputable kook whose endorsement should be an embarrassment.

In recent weeks, both Barack Obama and John McCain have suffered exactly this kind of indignity, under very different circumstances. And their contrasting responses revealed not only aspects of their own characters but also the enduring prejudices of the national media covering this year’s campaign.

For an African-American politician seeking to attract voters of all ethnicities and persuasions, there could hardly be a less desirable supporter than Louis Farrakhan, the aging leader of the Nation of Islam. As the media never tire of reminding us, Mr. Farrakhan is a habitual bigot whose utterances have repeatedly denigrated Jews, Catholics, Caucasians and homosexuals, among others, seeking to inflame his followers against these supposed enemies. He detects conspiracies of “international bankers,” whose machinations he blames for all the world’s troubles dating back to World War II. He looks forward to a time when the Holy Land will be “cleansed by blood,” as he exclaimed in a sermon not long ago. He warns that the evil ones ruling the planet will someday be destroyed for their sins, while those who obey his admonishments (and tithe to his organization) will be saved.

Well aware of Mr. Farrakhan’s record, since both of them reside in Chicago, Mr. Obama forthrightly rejected the support of the unsavory minister. Unfortunately his own Christian pastor, Jeremiah Wright, has chosen to associate himself with the Nation of Islam, which may well create problems for the candidate—but at least Mr. Obama has clearly separated himself from the poisonous Farrakhan philosophy.

By contrast, Mr. McCain went out of his way last week to accept the endorsement of a Christian pastor with a deeply disturbing record of bigotry and extremism. That would be John Hagee, the San Antonio televangelist whose career is chronicled in God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, a new book by investigative reporter Sarah Posner. As Ms. Posner reveals, Mr. Hagee is the kind of evangelical minister who has anticipated the end of the world for decades now, even as he promises untold riches to those who tithe to his ministry. He is an ardent warmonger who, like Mr. Farrakhan, seems to imagine a Middle East cleansed by blood—except that in his fantasies, the Christians will be saved while everyone else burns in the lake of fire. (The saved won’t include members of the Catholic Church, however, which he despises and denounces as venomously as Mr. Farrakhan does.)

But the perspectives of these two self-proclaimed men of God resemble each other even more closely in certain ways. He, too, promotes hatred of homosexuals and demands that women submit to men. And he, too, imagines a conspiracy by international bankers, the Bavarian Illuminati, the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations and other shadowy groups to deliver America into the hands of Satan. All that verbiage is merely code for traditional anti-Semitism, as Mr. Hagee surely knows because, like Mr. Farrakhan, he blames the Jewish people for their own persecution, including the Holocaust, as he explained a few years ago in a book titled Jerusalem Countdown.

Yet for reasons that seem more related to race than reason, the assorted inanities of Mr. Hagee are acceptable while those of Mr. Farrakhan are not, at least in the higher circles of the Republican Party and the national media. No matter how many times Mr. Obama rejects the Nation of Islam leader, a television anchor or a debate moderator will demand that he do so again, if only to mention their names in the same breath.

Meanwhile Mr. McCain continue to escape the hard questions that should be asked about his embrace of Mr. Hagee, whose ugly words and mad prophecies ought to repel him. Eight years ago, the San Antonio minister was among the political preachers, including Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell, who denounced Mr. McCain and proclaimed George W. Bush to be the Lord’s chosen candidate.

Back then, the Arizona Republican proved his maverick courage when he rebuked them as “agents of intolerance.” He has sought to court their favor ever since—and it is sad to see him genuflect now to the same kind of demagogue he once mocked.

Within the next two weeks, the number of American troops killed in Iraq is likely to reach 4,000, assuming that the average number of fatal casualties per day remains steady. It is an arbitrary number, given meaning by the fact that the nation may briefly take notice, but a day will come in this presidential campaign when Senator John McCain must explain what he thinks we have gained by the sacrifice of those men and women.

Anticipating that prospect must make Mr. McCain uneasy, or so his latest remarks on the war seem to suggest. Speaking to reporters on his campaign bus the other day, he blurted out his concern that unless he can persuade voters that the current policy is succeeding in Iraq, “then I lose. I lose.”

Almost immediately he regretted his candor and asked for a quick rewrite. “If I may, I’d like to retract ‘I’ll lose.’ But I don’t think there’s any doubt that how they judge Iraq will have a direct relation to their judgment of me, my support of the surge,” he said.

As the presumptive Republican nominee—representing the continuation of a presidency that has fallen from favor with as many as eight out of 10 Americans—Mr. McCain has ample reason to worry. His forthright support of President Bush, the war, and the escalation of the past year is unlikely to endear him to independent voters who otherwise admire his maverick image and reform record. They still feel betrayed by the exaggerations and lies that led us into war. They want to spend no more lives or money on this misadventure.

Against that overwhelming public sentiment, Mr. McCain insists that he can see “a clear path to success in Iraq,” with American and civilian casualties declining and Iraqis assuming responsibility for their own security. The Arizona senator evidently realizes that his recent prediction of a century-long American occupation did not go over well. “All of us want out of Iraq,” he told the Associated Press on Feb. 25. “The question is how do we want out of Iraq.”

Yet even while he uttered those soothing words, the Pentagon was preparing a new deployment schedule that proved the path to success is far from clear. The “surge” in U.S. combat forces has not led to stability but to a terrible dilemma for American commanders in Iraq. The current level of combat troops is not sustainable, but reducing that level is likely to provoke increased violence. For the moment, the White House hopes to maintain enough force strength to forestall the inevitable reckoning until sometime after Election Day.

Certainly the troop escalation helped to revive Mr. McCain’s fortunes in the Republican primary contest, quelling any dissent among his rivals (except for the indefatigable, unelectable Representative Ron Paul). Yet the escalation appears to have had little political impact outside the G.O.P., despite all the promotional hype. If Mr. McCain is truly depending on the surge to elect him in November, he won’t find the data reassuring.

Many national surveys show significant numbers of Americans agree that sending more troops has improved conditions in Iraq. But those same surveys show that the temporary improvement has not changed their opinions about the war. A substantial majority believes that invading Iraq was a mistake, that we should bring the troops home within a year and that the Bush administration has handled the war badly or very badly.

For months we have heard little discussion of the war, as the primaries diverted us with the ephemera of push polls, plagiarism and Fred Thompson. Sooner or later, the debate over the war will intensify again, offering its leading senatorial advocate an opportunity to tell us why the invasion was justified, given the absence of weapons of mass destruction; what he expects the continuing occupation to accomplish; when those objectives will be achieved; and why the installation of a Shia regime so closely linked with the mullahs in Iran is worth the sacrifices that we all mourn.

So far Mr. McCain has preferred angry sound bites to substantive argument. He regularly accuses Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic leadership in Congress of wanting to “wave the white flag of surrender,” a demagogic cliché that ought to be beneath him.

But it is important to remember that on the subject of military conflict, the venerable veteran is not always rational. He has said we should have pursued “victory” in Vietnam, although we lost 10 times as many Americans there as we have so far in Iraq. Perhaps someone will ask him a simple question: How many dead is too many in this war?

As a presidential candidate, John McCain stands out not only for his vocal endorsement of the unpopular war in Iraq but also because one of his own sons is a Marine Corps officer on active duty there. He supports the war even at the price of his own career or the life of a child he loves.

Yet although the senator from Arizona is obviously no chicken hawk, he carefully avoids “straight talk” about the real costs of this war in dollars and debt. Like every other politician who agrees with the Bush policy of prolonged war and occupation, he still pretends that we can spend hundreds of billions of dollars on this endless misadventure without collecting enough tax revenue to pay the actual costs.

Hundreds of billions? Sorry, but that vague estimate is probably far too modest, according to a new book by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes. In The Trillion-Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, they warn that the war’s “true budgetary cost,” excluding interest, “is likely to reach $2.7 trillion.” Aside from the price of munitions, contractors, transport, fuel and other fixed costs, their calculations are based on the government’s continuing obligation to provide medical care and disability payments for the thousands of wounded Iraq and Afghanistan veterans over the coming decades.

Those costs represent a moral debt on which we cannot default—and they will grow larger every day that we maintain the occupation. Even if the war could be ended immediately, the fiscal obligations incurred by the invasion and occupation will continue. Beyond the mandatory disability payments, medical and psychiatric care and additional benefits to which our vets are entitled, the nation will face years of increasing military budgets to restore the equipment and readiness of our battered armed forces, especially the Army and the National Guard.

Even in the “best case” scenario envisioned by Mr. Stiglitz and Ms. Bilmes, with our troop presence declining rapidly, the U.S. commitment in Iraq is still likely to cost no less than $400 billion over the next several years, on top of the $800 billion or so that we have spent to date. Those figures, which don’t include veterans’ benefits, add up to $1.2 trillion. What the authors call their “realistic-moderate scenario” for a prolonged presence in Iraq will cost twice as much or more.

Having served at the highest levels of the federal government, both authors understand that the Bush administration’s war budgeting has been a travesty—aided and abetted by lawmakers such as Mr. McCain, who have gone along all the way. Instead of accounting honestly for the war’s costs and requesting the necessary funds to pay for them, the White House has routinely used “emergency” supplemental requests as a device to hide the truth. The emergency process prevents the Office of Management and Budget as well as Congressional staff from thoroughly reviewing the data. Inevitably, they explain, this lack of transparency and competence has resulted in waste, fraud and corruption in payments to contractors, most of them politically wired, while essential equipment and veteran care remain underfunded.

Compounding the disgrace is the fact that the Bush administration and Congress financed these “emergency” budgets by borrowing, rather than raising taxes, as the United States has traditionally done in times of war. The Bush administration has insisted on reducing taxes, with most benefits accruing to the wealthiest individuals, while piling on debt for succeeding administrations and generations (and leaving the nation’s infrastructure to rot away, too). The politicians who have cooperated in this outrage, such as Mr. McCain, should tell us why they still call themselves “conservative.”

Back in 2001, when he was still in his maverick phase, the Arizona senator voted against the Bush tax cuts. Today he says that he objected to the budgetary flimflam that cut taxes without reducing program costs, but at the time he claimed to worry about the excessive premiums for the very rich. Now he runs around promising “no new taxes” just like every standard right-wing Republican.

In an unguarded moment, Mr. McCain once confessed that he doesn’t know much about economics. Even he should be able to comprehend the disastrous fiscal effects of the Iraq war, which its proponents originally promised would cost us almost nothing. Perhaps he should ask an economist to calculate the real cost of occupying Iraq for a hundred years, as he imagines—and how many generations will pay dearly for this mistake.

For the next month or so, the conservative valentines will arrive every day at the headquarters of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. The Illinois senator’s image will be illuminated by the bipartisan aura of admiration from prominent Republican commentators and strategists, as they savor the promise of his victory over Hillary Clinton, long the object of their hatred. He may well imagine that they really like him—and surely some of them do, at least for now.

Such happy feelings are easily conjured these days, when William Kristol hopes Democratic superdelegates will do “the good deed” of pledging their ballots to him, and when George Will urges Democrats to choose him as “the party’s most potentially potent nominee,” and when Peggy Noonan promises that he will be “bulletproof” against Republican attack.  read more »

The revival of John McCain’s presidential candidacy, now expected to carry him through to his party’s nomination, can be interpreted as either proof of the judgment of Republican primary voters or evidence of the paucity of alternative choices. Certainly, it confirms the wisdom of betting against the predictions of the national press corps, which produced so many sorrowful postmortems on his campaign.

Very soon, if not instantly, the same pundits who wrote off Mr. McCain’s chances will be assuring us that the recent has-been is now an electoral juggernaut. They will describe him resplendent in political valor, reforming zeal and militant patriotism, and of course brimming with “straight talk.” Of such shiny publicity has the Arizona senator’s image been built over the past decade or so.  read more »

The most likely motive for Bill Clinton’s reckless political performance in recent weeks, ironically and sadly, is to redress the terrible humiliations he inflicted on his wife in years past. But unless he quickly regains control of himself, the most likely result will be to inflict irreparable damage on the presidential aspirations of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Whether he has done that much harm already remains to be determined in the primaries ahead. At the very least, however, the former president has begun to change the polarity of his own presence in her campaign from positive to negative—and to raise real questions about the meaning of his return to the White House.  read more »

Supporters of one Democratic candidate or another may insist that their man or woman won last Monday’s debate in South Carolina, but in their hearts most viewers could only have been disappointed by its childish tenor and puerile content. Unless those viewers happened to be Republicans, of course—in which case they could only have been delighted.

With a worried nation edging toward financial panic and dragging down the world economy—thanks to foolish ideas and bad management—the Democrats seem strangely preoccupied with petty snarking.

A debate is supposed to be a discussion of policy, but this last was nothing more than a blather of insults. It diminished both Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, while former Senator John Edwards only emphasized his irrelevance with glancing blows at both contenders.  read more »

As America marks the first anniversary of the troop escalation in Iraq, at least one thing has become clear. Although the “surge” is failing as policy, it seems to be succeeding as propaganda. Even as George W. Bush continues to bump and scrape along the bottom of public approval, significantly more people now believe that we are “winning” the war.

What winning really means and whether that vague impression can be sustained are questions that the war’s proponents would prefer not to answer for the moment. Their objective during this election year is simply to reduce public pressure for withdrawal, which is still the choice of an overwhelming majority of voters.  read more »

“They will try to Swift Boat me,” said Barack Obama in the days before the New Hampshire primary, looking forward to the Democratic nomination that he now believes will be his with a prediction that is both accurate and chilling.

Whether he can go on to claim the nomination is yet to be determined. Much more predictable is the nature of the campaign that will be waged against him—and the fickleness of the national press corps when that ugly process eventually reaches its nadir.

The effective template for attacking a Democratic nominee was developed by former Republican political boss Karl Rove during decades of trench warfare in Texas and across the country. Whether he is whispering advice from the sidelines next fall won’t matter much, because his approach can be easily copied by lesser talents: Seize upon the Democrat’s most attractive quality and sow doubts to undermine that appeal. With candidates such as John Kerry and Max Cleland, that meant tearing down their records as war heroes and raising questions about their patriotism.

With Mr. Obama, the obvious target is his inspirational life story. The task of the opposition operatives will be to twist that saga, to unearth facts or factoids that raise concerns about the candidate’s background, and to make his cosmopolitan upbringing appear alien and even sinister—and of course to play the race card against him, either subtly or blatantly. These themes will begin to appear in the right-wing press, which is of course where the original Swift Boat smears first showed up four years ago.

Indeed, that process has begun, and is accelerating along with Mr. Obama’s drive toward the nomination. Conservatives will briefly applaud him for defeating Hillary Clinton, the immediate object of their hatred, which they will then turn on him as the next target. Denigrating material about the front-runner—whose popularity and skill they clearly fear—will be ready for deployment very shortly, but will not be aired until his nomination is a certainty.

Meanwhile, certain themes are being tested on the Web sites of the extreme right. The basic concept is to suggest that Mr. Obama is not as wholesome as he appears to be. On these sites and in e-mail barrages, he is portrayed as the son and stepson of Muslims from Africa and Asia, who worshipped in mosques and madrasas as a young boy. That is a proven falsehood surrounding a tiny grain of fact, but no matter. Repetition will make the poison.

Next will come questions about the Chicago church he attends, whose eccentric pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a close friend and spiritual adviser to the Obama family. In an article published on the Newsmax Web site just days ago, Mr. Wright is depicted as a raving black nationalist and a proud associate of Louis Farrakhan. He is prone to polarizing remarks about a wide range of topics, from Jews and Israel to the disappearance of Natalee Holloway.

That Newsmax article on the relationship between Mr. Obama and Mr. Wright displays at least one aspect of the campaign under construction on the right. Although such Web sites may seem marginal, they are not—and more powerful forces are clearly indicating their interest in these same lines of attack.

Brad Blakeman, a former Bush White House aide who now runs Freedoms Watch, a political committee funded by major Republican donors that has aired several pro-war commercials, told Newsmax that he was aware of the Obama-Wright connection.

“If your spiritual adviser makes outrageous statements, it’s incumbent on you as a leader to denounce those statements,” he said. “Silence is an admission that you agree with what your spiritual adviser pronounces.”

Newsmax concluded that “if Obama is his party’s nominee, his Republican opponent will rightly be able to make use of Rev. Wright and his radical teachings as effectively as supporters of George H.W. Bush used Willie Horton’s furlough to help Bush win the presidency.” In other words, be prepared for the attack ads to be aired by Freedoms Watch and other shadowy, well-funded organizations, just like the Willie Horton ads put up by an earlier “independent committee” in 1988.

The right wing will do exactly the same thing to Hillary Clinton if she somehow revives her campaign, of course—except that those ads would have to be reruns.

As political buzzwords, “bipartisan” and “non-partisan” and “independent” sound elevated and even virtuous, which must be why we so often hear them touted as remedies for our national ills. Every four years the promoters of these miracle cures seek a vessel for their illusions, preferably someone whose fortune is as limitless as his ego. This year’s model seems to be Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York and billionaire owner of the national business news service.

The immediate charm of a Bloomberg candidacy—or the candidacy of any other such supposed savior—is that it serves as a blank screen suitable for the projection of whatever obsessions, beliefs, projects or personal qualities are desired.

He is not only independent but free-floating, at least in the imaginations of his would-be supporters; he is not only devoid of ideology but practically free of content altogether, like nonpartisanship itself.  read more »

Not so long ago, the conventional wisdom of Washington proclaimed that Hillary Rodham Clinton could not be stopped from winning the Democratic presidential nomination. Today, the same wise men and women hint that she has forfeited the prize.

But she has never been unstoppable—and she has certainly not yet been stopped.

What must always be remembered when estimating the prospects of Senator Clinton is that the mainstream media amplifies her campaign’s errors and diminishes her strengths in ways that can be misleading. Foaming expressions of hostility to her are considered normal among the Beltway pundits, especially on cable television and talk radio. Such constant emotional outbursts tend to distort political news and analysis.  read more »