Postgame pundits describe the speech as workmanlike, and that's probably on the mark. President Obama's inaugural address nestles passages of startling power among prosaic, almost progrommatic declarations. As a speech, it was a bit disjointed. But as a call to arms for a new era? Fairly magnificent.

I'd like to focus on one point that I haven't seen elsewhere, about Obama's ambitious desire to change the mentality of Americans. Or rather, restore a previous, healthier mentality about work and sacrifice, the real values that undergird American greatness, according to Obama:

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.

Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things -- some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor -- who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth. For us, they fought and died in places Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh.

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

Obama here is aiming straight at the financial crisis' root problem. Though the economic crisis is mind-bogglingly complex, the heart of our problems is the ethos of easy money (fanned, of course, by the easy credit/low-interest/deregulatory policies of the last twenty years). Think back to 2005, the year when "New Gilded Age" articles were in vogue. It was a hallucinary time, when high school grads in my office suite would be pulling in 250 large to process mortgage applications, when party conversation revolved around the latest real estate acquisition and/or remodeling woes, when folks watched shows like "Flip That House!", and when bonuses for money-swapping middlemen in their late-20s reached 8 figures. Everyone's got a shortcut to riches. And nobody really connected this loot to, you know, productivity, which is how income and wealth are generated. Folks forget, in bubble periods, that this great swell of dough is coming from somewhere. As it turns out, the money came due in 2008.

Obama, an adherent of behavioral economics, reminds us in this address that "those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism" This focus on responsibility and hard work is the first salvo in the project to reverse a dangerous mentality that led to so many actors to make so many poor decisions.

In 1994, most people make between $30,000 and $80,000. To make 400K, you better have gotten lucky with the right business, put your money down on a longshot, or you're capable of removing human organs with some degree of precision. You made dough because your work provided economic value commisurate with your income, or you took a commisurate level of risk for your reward. Over the last fifteen years, but especially in the last five, the fruits of economic growth increasingly went to groups that didn't provide the corresponding economic value. Growth, and income was generated by transfers of money and the creation of clever financial instruments that promised risk-reducing miracles by offering derivative insurance and bets against defaults. With these new Wall Street overlords in charge, the banks see no problem lending $300,000 to a guy making 18 grand a year as the risk of default is sold off in packaged securities. The guy making $18 Gs doesn't see any problem buying a $300,000 house, because he thinks he can flip it in a year.

All of this were driven by financial innovations that disproprotionately benefit the middle man. In a sound economy, the middle people -- stock brokers, mortgage brokers, agents, accountants, lawyers, financiers, etc -- keep the wheels greased so the cogs of capitalism can turn efficiently. In our economy, the cogs were the middlepeople; financial services, a field that essentially performs complicated transfers of pre-existing money, became the dominant sector. It's just crazy.

Obama's task as president is nothing short of restructuring the US economy. A big part of that goal is reconfigure the engine so that green technology and its derivatives, rather than consumer, fuels our economy. But an important, if less discussed part of his task is refashioning American thinking so that individuals and institutions aren't driven by bad incentives, fallacies and poor framing of economic choices. Reminding folks that money = work is a good place to start.

* Some good economic crisis materials:

- Giant Pool of Money, from This American Life -- perhaps the best explanation in layman's terms of the subprime mess that ignited the crisis. Everyone should listen to it.
- The NY Times "The Reckoning" series, very good pieces that serve as indictments of the major bad actors.
- The blog Calculated Risk, which was way ahead of everyone in sounding alarms, is worth checking out from time to time.
- This NY Times chart is pretty cool, too:


Update on 1/24/09: Frank Rich has a better piece expressing pretty much the same thoughts.

Michelle Cottle has a very perceptive post discussing aggressive careerism in the context of the Caroline Kennedy debacle. Cottle's point is obvious, but some of us with high self-regard need to be reminded that, in order to get where you want to go, especially in this dire climate, proper decorum and "face" are drawbacks, as Cottle notes in discussing Burris vis-a-vis Kennedy:

The man was appointed to Obama's Senate seat by a governor charged with trying to sell that very seat, prompting many folks to ask how Burris could be so vulgar and shameless in his ambition. The entire Democratic leadership vowed that Ron Paul would be president before Burris would be seated in the Senate. But Burris reallllly wanted that job. So he showed up at the Capitol on swearing-in day and got himself very publicly kicked out. Undeterred, he kept on chugging, chatting up the drama-obsessed media, meeting with members of the caucus. And look at him now! Downing ice tea and warm rolls in the Senate dining room with the rest of the club.

Caroline wasn't pushy enough. She wasn't aggressive enough. And she wasn't shameless enough to power through all the hurdles in her path and take what she wanted. On the most basic level, I suppose you could chalk this whole mess up to her individual personality. (Certainly, neither Hillary! nor Sarah! would have folded so easily.) But when we're talking about the number of gals on the political landscape in general, it's worth noting that such Carolinian personality traits are not infrequently cited as contributing to the stubborn gender imbalance within a number of fields, my own included.

Though Cottle arrives at a gender-specific conclusion, the necessity of aggressive douchebaggery should be drilled into the heads of a whole category of talented men and women who don't want to appear too desperate in their career ambitions, leading to stalled lives and thwarted goals.

Just trying to sneak this post in before heading out to Las Vegas for canvassing and election monitoring. Predictions:

President

Obama - 53% - 353 EV
McCain - 45% - 185

Swing States

Obama will win: Kerry + IA, NM, CO, VA, NV, OH, FL, NC (roughly in that order of strength)
McCain will win: IN, MO, ND, MT, GA

The race has been teetering between 6-8%, and I still expect a small tightening going into election day. But the early voting has shown that Obama's groundgame and enthusiasm advantage is real, and it may be decisive even if McCain moves many of the undecideds to his column with a last minute ad barrage. This GOTV gap, an advantage for Bush in 2004, will provide a cushion for Obama.

Senate

Democrats will win: VA, NM, CO, AK, NH, OR, NC, MN (in a squeaker). GA will go to a run-off.
GOP will hold the rest (including KY) and win no Dem seats.

House

Dems +25 seats.

It's really funny that right-wingers think that they are the "true" Americans, because they're almost dangerously untethered to the mainstream, by now having created an alternative culture and media that chronicles an alternate reality, one where ACORN is a mortal threat to the fabric of democracy, where Bill Ayers is one of the world's most dangerous men, and where the financial crisis was caused not by the creation of highly leveraged derivatives, but by the Democrats' pushing for more minority home ownership.

In this bubble, what's scary isn't the dangerous incompetence of George Bush and his disastrous eight years -- recognized by pretty much all non-wingnuts -- but "socialists" like Barack Obama who wants to raise taxes on folks making over $250,00. And ironically, John McCain, one of the few prominent Republicans who has resisted the wingnut echo chamber in the past, is now completely ensnared in it.

If, in the previous two debates, McCain was a little too caught up in his own personal crusades (read: earmarks; taking on his own party), here was a performance that was launched from wingnuttia, where "spreading the wealth around" is dangerous, where $250,000+ earning "Joe the Plumber" is the stand-in for Mr. America, where "health of the mother" is somehow code for zealots, where only liberal wimps are concerned about storing nuclear power "safely", and vouchers are a cure-all for education.

The pundits thought McCain did well because he was aggressive and forced he debate, but the trouble is the right-wing philosophy he was espousing didn't connect to people, and the shorthand he was using made sense only to the cheerleaders over on The Corner. By contrast, Obama didn't launch into sputtering attacks on the Alaska Independence Party, G. Gordon Liddy, Diebold, Troopergate, the torture memos, US Attorney firings, and any number of other liberal blog causes. The rather phlegmatic Obama, in cool professorial mode, explained his policy proposals in detail, over and over. Unlike the 2nd debate, Barack was off his game and missed a lot of obvious retorts. But he did his job.

And more importantly, Obama looked calm and unflappable. McCain looked like a meth fiend, bulging his eyes, and moving around in his seat like a maniac. Is it any wonder McCain got slammed again in the snap polls?

It's clear that McCain is an uncoachable candidate, and that his downfall was trying to run a Bush '04 base/echo chamber campaign that is both wrong for the times and completely unsuitable for himself.

Everyone's writing the "pre-mortem" of McCain-Palin, and with pretty good reason. It's really hard to see how he comes back. Let's look at the state of the race as of October 14:

Polls, Polls, Polls

Obama's now up by about 8 points in the national polls, and looking even better in the electoral college. Polling guru Nate Silver says that Obama has a 1-2 point advantage in the electoral college, meaning that he'll likely get over 270 even if he's trailing by a small margin. Beyond the obvious trends, Obama appears to have a few hidden advantages as well. Silver looked at the cell phone effect and concluded that it results in a 2.8 point error in this election, meaning that one should add roughly 2.8 points to Obama with respect to any poll conducted only by landlines. Then there's the effect of the groundgame. Due to a combination of massive amounts of money, a deep, abiding commitment to building a highly motivated grassroots GOTV organization, and incredible voter enthusiasm, you're likely to see a historic turnout among African-Americans and the 18-30 age bracket, both of which is likely to be devalued in likely voter models. Ann Selzer, the pollster who called the Iowa caucuses right, has consistently used models that weighed for higher youth and minority turnout, leading to a "house effect" in favor of Obama by at least 2 points. If she's right, then we're looking at 4-5 "hidden" points for Obama that doesn't show up in the typical tracking poll. To be conservative, I'd guess that Obama has a 3-point edge based on groundgame/enthusiasm/demographics.

Wingnuts, though, argue that polls are overstating Obama's lead. They're hanging on to their hopes that the Bradley Effect will doom Obama. Never mind that the Bradley Effect is pretty much a myth, as Silver (again) shows. Not only has it not shown up in recent elections, it's unclear there was a "Bradley Effect" in Tom Bradley race in '82, as his opponent Deukmejian's pollster attests. In the era of robo-polls and character smears, it makes little sense that voters will say they're voting for Obama in the polls, but do something else in the ballot box.

That's not to say there isn't a racism effect. In the primaries, Clinton tends to win over the "made up mind in last 3 days" group by large margins, suggesting that, if race were a factor, it may be that undecideds will flow disproportionately towards McCain.

Just to be cautious, let's give McCain 3 out of 4 undecideds. Even so, given the other effects, if Obama can be at 46% in the last round of polls, he'll likely win the electoral college. So Obama can afford to lose a few points from his total right now and still be okay.

Electoral Map

Here's where Obama has the biggest advantage. Obama needs 270 electoral votes (or 269, as a tie goes to the Democratic House). Right now, there are basically no Kerry states are in danger, amounting to 252 votes. Add Bush '04 states Iowa and New Mexico, which leans strongly towards Obama and you're at 264. Even if the national race tightens up, Obama will have 264 votes in his pocket as he seeks to poach just one state among: Colorado, Virginia, Florida, Nevada, or Ohio (North Carolina, Missouri, and Indiana would move to lean McCain if the race tightens). McCain has to sweep all five states -- win five coin flips in a row, essentially -- to win.

Bizarrely, the McCain campaign spends time trying to poach Wisconsin, Pennsylvania (where Obama has at least a 10 point lead in every poll taken this month), and Iowa. His tactical decisions remind me of Bush in 2000, when they decided to do psy-ops by going to California in the last week. Right now, McCain's only shot is to win a bunch of battleground states by the slimmest of margins, against an opponent with a 2-to-1 spending advantage. That means he needs to pour all of his resources into the five critical states and make a stand. What he shouldn't be doing is spending time in Pennsylvania just to show he's going on offense.


Wednesday's Debate

It'll be about the economy, and I'm afraid McCain simply doesn't have the fluency on this topic to "win." He keeps associating the economy with either tax cuts or earmarks, when in a debate format, discussing the subject calls for half a dose of empathy with half a dose of pandering. That's just not John McCain. And Obama and Biden are baiting McCain to bring up Ayers; I suspect that Obama's got something up his sleeve.

It's difficult to see McCain shaking the race up tomorrow, given the way the two candidates have performed thus far in these forums.

Next three weeks and McCain's constraints

A lot of us expected that the last few weeks of this election will be Wright/Ayers/random bogeyman. But events -- and Steve Schmidt -- have proceeded to neuter the effects of an Atwateresque finale. Events are obvious -- character smears look like obvious petty distractions in the face of this financial maelstrom. And any time McCain goes there, Obama can say he's diverting attention from The Issues.

As for tactics, Steve Schmidt made two enormous mistakes, both of which are stemmed from a kind 2004 mentality that assumes reality will bend to the will of the GOP. The first concerns the voters. It's a widespread assumption that persuadable voters are not knowledgeable and easily manipulated, but Schmidt took this assumption too far and treated voters like complete morons. This tendency to insult the voter was especially pronounced the Sarah Palin rollout, when they came out with doozies like "Palin has foreign policy experience because Alaska was next to Russia" that are just ridiculous on their face. And when nobody bought this story or Palin's vaunted "executive experience", the message team just kept pushing. After the "lipstick on a pig" gambit, it looked like the McCain team were just a bunch of cynical hacks to any voter not in the tank. By repeatedly pushing idiotic messages, McCain whittled away his hard-earned credibility, one of the candidate's longstanding strengths.

The other mistake is the gaming of the media, which is the same mistake Hillary Clinton's team made. Again, the Palin rollout is emblematic. Remember when Palin was introduced, the media took it upon themselves to vet her -- with good reason. And when the media caught her in a lie about rejecting the Bridge to Nowhere, they decided to ignore the media and just brazenly repeat the lie over and over again. This kind of spin is a big F- you to the media, and coupled with Schmidt's furious newscycle-uber-alles approach to politics, really damaged McCain's standing in the media. Remember, John McCain is (or was) the biggest media darling in politics, and instead of capitalizing on that, the McCain campaign re-ran the anti-media Bush 04 campaign. This year, when the GOP's power is at an ebb, the media fought back.

Of course, McCain's media problem isn't just his fault. Barack Obama happens to be the perfect media-friendly candidate: a good-looking, graceful, cosmopolitan, hyper-intelligent black Democrat who is about as earnest as a politician can be in this day and age. He's a once-in-a-few generations type talent, and one precisely plays well with the media. Though I've had serious issues with Obama's message operation, one thing that helps him with the media is that he typically takes a higher road and doesn't press hard on idiotic spin. And the toxic rumors surrounding his exotic background has also triggered the media's paternalistic instincts. This week's newscycles, much of it revolving around right-wing lunatics yelling out hateful remarks at McCain-Palin rallies, evidence this paternalism.

McCain's also been boxed in by two other factors out of McCain's control. One is that the right-wing base consists of a good chunk of troglodytes who shouldn't be let out of the house. The ones they put on TV are of course extremist lunatics mouthing discredited conspiracy theories. Loonies on TV grab viewer attention. But also, the Republican base is way out of the mainstream; these are the Bush dead-enders, the ones that still approve of their leader long after he's been exposed as a total failure to the rest of America. So they're out there hectoring McCain to go nuclear when McCain knows this strategy is a loser. He's in a "damn if he does, damn if he doesn't" position vis-a-vis the base.

The base will also cry foul whenever McCain proposed pandering economic programs -- the only kind that can really help him win over voters. I'm personally opposed to the mortgage buy-back plan proposed by McCain during the second debate, but it seems like with a PR push, it can prove to be quite popular. But alas, with the wingnuts going, well, nuts over it, this proposal really never had a chance. He's not only boxed in tactically, but also on policy as well.

The other factor is the Obama team's savvy pre-emptory moves. Obama and Biden have hammered McCain for trying to "turn the page"; any attempt to engage in character smears will provoke a hearty "this guy's trying to distract you because his plan is the same as Bush's" rebuke. The "erratic" charge, which is taking hold, also restricts McCain's ability to come up with new gambits to try to shake up the race. Both the media and Obama will immediately jump on any gambit and frame it as a desperate stunt. (Obama's team, throughout the election season, has played defense superbly but offense poorly.)

Since the beginning of the general election campaign, McCain's strategy has been to "disqualify" Obama. It turns out McCain probably could've kept it close (and even win) if he concentrated on refining his message and image (which hopefully will be the subject of a "pre-mortem" post). By making so many mistakes, McCain's now in a position where he's simply doesn't have the tools to disqualify Obama. He'll have to hope that some intervening event, or a big Obama slip up, changes the race. In the meantime, I think the experience + POW + divided government message is his best bet to prevent himself from sliding further back as he waits for a prayer to be answered.

Obama's haymaker

Obama likes it smooth and steady. It looks he's sitting on wads of cash, which means he'll win the air wars (even with all of those mediocre message ads). All he has to do is stop McCain's message from penetrating while his GOTV advantage kicks in and Obama should win. So while he's not in prevent defense mode yet, he appears quite content to sit back and trade punts with McCain. It's probably the best strategy; as in the primaries, Obama lacks the killer instinct to finish an opponent off, but why take the chance?

Of course, if he does want a quick knockout, McCain's weak spot is right in the open: Sarah Palin. A concerted effort to hammer Palin (who now have the highest unfavorables of anyone on either ticket) and tie her to McCain's poor judgment (and age) will surely doom McCain. It won't happen, because Obama doesn't need a KO, but I kinda wanna see him try.

Beverly Hills Chihuahua v. Body of Lies

The mood in the country is depressed and anxious; folks what something light, a bit of uplift. Last weekend, the star-studded dark CIA thriller gets walloped by a talking dog comedy in its second week. I hope the Obama team is paying attention and close with some well-produced inspiring, feel-good ads. Like the kind that aired during the Olympics, but maybe with a bit more meat.

John McCain is a national disgrace. He's now willing to run a campaign based almost entirely on falsehoods that are so surreal that, in a country with a less fearful press, would start out every campaign story with the words "the lying McCain campaign".

The "honorable" John McCain? "Putting country first"? This guy is trying to stoke racial resentment at a moment of serious national crisis, and his campaign is trying to sell out his country by holding nothing more than hate rallies that try to stoke the anger of the pond scum that constitute the wingnut base. John McCain should forever be known as a pathetically little scumbag who got smaller when the moment called for something bigger. No amount of pathetic post-election contrition that he will surely express can excuse this display of moral cowardice.

This is dangerous stuff. If something should happen to Obama between now and the election, there will be a serious reckoning.

If you enjoy watching poker on TV, you'd rather watch a table that features a bigime LAG -- a loose, unpredictable player who will make a play with trash hands -- than a bunch of methodical "math" players. Unpredictable play makes for far better TV. In the same way, I'm grateful for John McCain, an adrenaline fiend whose drama queen antics have made this election perhaps the best reality television show in history. Even better than Real World, Season 3.

LAGs are fun to watch, but it's a high-risk style that's difficult to master, and McCain, it appears, hasn't quite gotten there. As with the Palin pick, you can't blame McCain for taking a big chance. At the start of the week, he was stalling in the polls, faltering in swing states, and in danger of going down with the Dow Jones as the narrative was turning against him. He needed to shake things up. So it looks like his campaign tried to stage some kind of intervention -- the story was supposed to be that the economy was saved by...John McCain! But between the time he decided on this gambit, and his arrival in DC, the GOP House members had gone into open revolt. The incoherent speech by the president failed to add clarity to the stakes here as the perception that this was a "Wall Street bailout" began to be widely accepted. The political pressure ratcheted up as some of the more cynical GOP strategists saw an opening to triangulate against the Dems and the Bush administration.

So McCain couldn't perform his planned Kabuki and instead faced a real dilemma: If he aligns himself fully with the GOP hardliners, he'll make a mockery of his talk of "bipartisanship" and saving the country. Attaching himself to a plan that offers more deregulation and capital gains tax cuts is also dangerous. But if he goes along with the Democrats and Bush's unpopular bailout, he wouldn't be able to distinguish himself from Obama while further alienating the GOP base. Brokering a deal is out as the GOP insurance scheme is fundamentally incompatible with Paulson's plan, which is about a massive federal purchase of of mortgage-backed securities that regulators believe are not correctly priced.

If McCain truly wanted to go all-in, he could have gone against the Paulson plan and played chicken by proposing some kind of populist alternative (there are no shortage of alternative bailout proposals out there) and stuck to his debate postponement threat. This would be the kind of bold positioning that may win him votes. But this plays risks disaster as, as market losses would be blamed on McCain if the Democrats refuse to play ball.

In reality, the financial crisis offered a menu of terrible political choices for all involved. A bailout is probably necessary, but any plan that aims to free up the credit market is a tough sell to voters. Why money to Wall Street? Why not bailout struggling homeowners? Or why not let Wall Street go down in flames? McCain would have been better off this week sitting back and assigning blame. He should have folded and waited for a better hand. Instead, he looked down, saw a 5-3 suited and thought this was the spot to make a move. So the guy raised preflop, raised the flop, got called by a cool and methodical Obama, and folded on the next bet.

Good LAGs make a read and follow through. John McCain made a bad read, tried to bluff his way out, and then folded after he got called. Maybe a good debate performance will change the subject. But this was an unforced error, a play that makes you look like a clown. A few more high-profile botch jobs like one, and McCain will lose the one big advantage he's had over Obama: McCain was supposed to be the safe choice.

Burn After Reading (Coen) - A-/B+

I've liked Brad Pitt in many things, but I would've guessed that he's far too preening an actor to be effective in this kind of Coens grotesquerie. Pitt's off-key in a few scenes early on, but man, when the plot kicked in, the dude had me in stitches, no more so than when he "menacingly" began to harass Osssboorne Cox. That scene in Malkovich's car -- where Pitt was all squints and nervous giggles ("You thought that was a Schwinn!?!") -- was pure hilarity.

She'll likely not be remembered in the year-end awards, but one actor with no hint of vanity is Frances McDormand, who isn't afraid to play a truly idiotic and despicable loon. Rest of the cast were equally fine. Though many of the other key actors were doing self-parodies, in the Coens hands, these parodies hit exactly the right key: Clooney's his usual garrulous ladies' man, but what's this top-secret device he's constructing in the basement? And Malkovich is Malkovich, but he's the Coens' mouthpiece here, a Man Who Wasn't There, a bitter misanthrope who finally gets fed up with the "league of morons" he's had to suffer all of his life.

This is the Coens at their most delectably nasty, where the [SPOILERS] two likable characters in the picture meet with grisly ends, and the story evaporates into an air of nothingness as the Coens insist, unfashionably, on the meaninglessness of it all. Predictably, the goo-goo critics hand-wring about the Coens' smarminess and misanthropy whenever they go full nihilist, as they do here. But time has validated this line of Coens Brothers movies (Raising Arizona, Lebowski, Burn), comedies that chronicle chains of destructive events caused by overreaching morons. In this one, especially, the Coens take dead aim at aggressive stupidity. We're talking not just about run-of-the-mill dumbness, but specifically the hyperactive, shoot-from-the-hip inanity of folks who devise crazy plans before pausing for a second for reflection. So you can view this as the Coens' comedic coda for the Bush administration -- what with the stupid actors that botch everything they touch and a government that constructs a hopelessly incoherent picture. But for the Coens, this malady was never just a post-millennial affliction: the Coens have been warning us about these kinds of Alpha-tards for over twenty years now. Maybe it's time that people pay them heed.