The Political Situation Today

Mitt Romney

Our Democratic standard bearer, the admittedly lib­er­al President Barack Obama, is in the fight of his life against Mitt Romney, the ex-Massachusetts governor and GOP nominee-presumptive for president.

Obama has had a checkered presidency, from many liberals' standpoint. Yes, he has gotten a health insurance reform through Congress that conservatives still lambaste as "Obamacare." Yes, he has done many other things we liberals applaud, such as:

• Standing up for women's rights to cost-free contraception and legal abortions
• Putting in place higher auto fuel-efficiency standards
• Temporarily blocking the Keystone tar-sands oil pipeline
• Pitting the weight of the federal government against states such as Alabama and Arizona, where recent laws potentially harass citizens and legal immigrants over their immigration status
• Ending the gay-unfriendly "don't ask, don't tell" policy in the military
• Coming out in favor of same-sex couples' right to wed

President Obama

Yet he has also failed to do a lot of things liberals assumed would be part of the "change we can believe in" touted in Obama's 2008 campaign. His health reform did not include any "public option," much less a government-run "single payer" system that many believe is the only way to sufficiently rein in the country's spiraling health costs.

He has not advanced a convincing long-range energy policy for the country that would show the way for reducing our "carbon footprint": our nation's hefty contribution to global climate change. Yes, Obama has called for an "all of the above" approach that would continue America's use of polluting coal- and petroleum-generated energy as it also embraces natural gas and nuclear energy, en route to full reliance on true renewables such as wind and solar power. But where, specifically, is the road map for his "all of the above" energy change?

Abroad, we're still at war in Afghanistan. Oddly, this doesn't seem to be a major point of contention at home, politically. Most Americans seem pretty numb to the continuing toll on our fighting personnel and on our military in general.

The President has, as promised, wrapped up the unpopular war in Iraq. He, at long distance, tracked down and killed the despised Osama bin Laden. His policy of limited but ultimately deadly intervention in Libya, undertaken in concert with our European allies, paid off in the elimination of dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Chen Guangcheng

On the other hand, he and the international community seem helpless to help rid Syria of its despised strongman, Bashar al-Assad. We seem to be no nearer to peace in Israel than we were in 2008. Countries like Iran and North Korea continue to threaten to go nuclear. Our relations with China, the world's second superpower nowadays, were supposedly going to be solidified by the recent visit of Secretary of State Clinton and Treasury Secretary Geithner, only to be preempted in the eyes of the world by the ongoing saga of an escaped dissident, the blind, self-taught lawyer Chen Guangcheng.

"It's the Economy, Stupid!"

But the 800-lb. gorilla in the room is — as always, these days — the economy. Unemployment is still way too high.

We've had some good news from recent monthly jobs reports. In January, unemployment decreased to 8.3 percent, as America added 243,000 jobs. In February, 227,000 more jobs were added ... but unemployment remained stuck at 8.3 percent. Many commentators, however, were (albeit hesitantly) suggesting the worst of the slump might be behind us.

(Click to enlarge.)

By the time the March report came out, showing 120,000 more jobs had been added and unem­ploy­ment had ticked down to 8.2 percent, there was less giddiness (if that's the right word) on offer.

Then, after the April report — 115,000 jobs added, the unemployment rate lit­tle changed at 8.1 percent — the recovery was being called "soft." The drop in the official unemployment figure was due, it was sadly confessed, mostly to unsuccessful job hunters dropping out of the workforce.

True, we've been adding jobs right along for more that a year (see chart at above right). And unemployment has edged downward. But the number of Americans out of work for over a year has remained problematically large. And the number of recent college grads that can find no jobs — or can get only jobs that they're over-educated for — is huge.

Lessons of the Past

If past election seasons are any guide ...

(Click to enlarge.)

... President Obama will have an uphill battle against Romney unless unemployment drops greatly between now and November. Since the end of World War II there have been ten presidents who've run for reelection (not counting Obama this year). The New York Times says (as reflected in the chart above) that no incumbent president since FDR has won reelection with unemployment over 7.2%. George H.W. Bush in 1992, Jimmy Carter in 1980, and Gerald Ford in 1976 — all three tried, and all three failed.

In 1984 the incumbent Ronald Reagan faced fairly high unemployment — 7.2 percent — but won reelection anyhow, by a landslide. Why? Probably in large part because the state of the economy was trending convincingly upward. It had in recent memory been much worse. So if Obama can convince voters that the economy's trend is decidedly on the upswing in November, he'll be in much better shape to beat Romney.

Paul Krugman's Rx

Paul Krugman

That seems dubious, though. To get unemployment down to the point where it's not too much over 7.2 percent and heading convincingly downward will demand, if 2008 Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman's new book End This Depression Now! is correct, that demand for economic goods and services ramp up strongly.

To an economist, "demand" is how much money we're spending on stuff, all told. "We," in the economist's eye, includes ordinary consumers, but it also includes businesses that buy from other businesses ... and it includes federal, state, and local governments.

Consumers and businesses large and small, including big corporations, haven't been spending enough money during the slump (which Krugman calls a "depression"). Smaller economic players have been saddled with debts that they are still struggling to pay off, including "underwater" home mortgages and unwieldy credit card balances. So they have cut back on current outlays.

Big corporations, meanwhile, have been "de-leveraging." They've decided they borrowed too much in the recent past, so they've been using their current revenues to pay off outstanding debt. Once that has been accomplished, they've been hoarding cash rather than investing it in new productive capacity. One result is that they've been laying off workers.

Banks and other financial enterprises over-lent in the run-up to the credit meltdown in 2008. There's not as much lending going on now, and a lot of the money that is being lent is being used by loan recipients to retire earlier debt and build up cash balances. It's not being spent on making, or buying, a lot of extra stuff.

So aggregate demand is way too low in our economy today. And it's only vigorous demand for new stuff that can spur economic growth and put people back to work, Krugman says.

To Krugman, who writes a regular op-ed column for the New York Times, the only source for this urgently needed extra demand has to be government spending — not austerity, a word bandied about more and more today.

John Maynard Keynes

Krugman is an an unabashed Keynesian, a disciple of the economist John Maynard Keynes who wrote, during the Great Depression, “The boom, not the slump, is the time for austerity.”

Keynes believed that the solution to the Great Depression would come only when total monetary outlays — aggregate demand — increased. And that's exactly what got us off the dime, in the end. In the run-up to the U.S. involvement in World War II, writes Krugman:

Long before Pearl Harbor, military spending soared as America rushed to replace the ships and other armaments sent to Britain as part of the lend-lease program, and as army camps were quickly built to house the millions of new recruits brought in by the draft. As military spending created jobs and family incomes rose, consumer spending also picked up (it would eventually be restrained by rationing, but that came later). As businesses saw their sales growing, they also responded by ramping up spending. 

And just like that, the Depression was over, and all those “unadaptable and untrained” workers were back on the job.

We today are not going to end our current "depression" by preparing for war, clearly. But we do need, Krugman says, to see government spending soar.

More "Stimulus"?

Yes, that means more "stimulus."

Fiscal "stimulus" is the current word for what in the Keynesian past was called "priming the pump." Krugman defines it as "temporary increases in government spending and/or tax cuts, designed to support overall spending and create jobs."

We did that in 2009, early in Obama's presidency: the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Says Krugman:

Unfortunately, the bill, clocking in at $787 billion, was far too small for the job. It surely mitigated the recession, but it fell far short of what would have been needed to restore full employment, or even to create a sense of progress.

But here's the thing: "Stimulus" has become just as much of a dirty word among conservatives today as "Keynesian."

If it's to be accomplished by temporary increases in government spending, conservatives dig in their heels against it. If it's to be accomplished by cutting taxes, especially on higher incomes, liberals blanch. And all efforts to put together balanced packages of the two — whether they increase government deficits in the short term or not — have failed ignominiously.

What's a sitting president to do?

If he doesn't do something, and soon, I have a great deal of doubt Obama can be re-elected ...

The Archetypal Sarah Palin

Yours truly, oldstyleliberal, has been impressed with Sarah Palin.

So have millions of other voters, one way or another, since John McCain announced the Alaska governor as his running mate just before Labor Day. Some love her and some love to hate her, but no other vice presidential candidate has ever, in my recollection, stirred so much passion and controversy.

When we react with our emotions and our gut feelings, then try to get our intellect on the same page, we are projecting. Specifically, we are casting the recipient of the projection in the role of an archetype.

An archetype is a potent figure in our unconscious mind, said the psychologist Carl Jung. Such an archetypal figure, common to all human beings, is the (imaginary) perfect mother. We are all born with the mother archetype, which in childhood we project onto our actual mom. That's how we "just know" our mom will nurture and protect us, in advance of any actual experience of having a mother.

Another potent figure in the unconscious mind of every human male, Jung said, is the anima, the archetype which gives us men our image of the (again, imaginary) ideal woman.

Neither of these two archetypes, nor any other archetypal ideal hidden in the deep, unconscious psyche, bears any necessary relation to those whom we project the archetypes out upon. Mom may be cruel, and the woman that a man marries because his anima was projected out upon her may turn out to be entirely wrong for him.

But never mind. We project our archetypes out onto people all the same, and we react to people based on these projections. That's part of what's going on with Sarah Palin. It's why oldstyleliberal is so impressed.


But archetypal projections are more complicated than that. Archetypes serve as points around which our life experiences and memories cluster — again, in ways that we are scarcely conscious of. These clusters Jung called complexes. We not only have a mother archetype that we all hold in common, we each as individuals have a mother complex. The mother complex can modify the archetype in strange ways. If our mother was neglectful and cruel, the mother complex that we harbor can take the ideal represented by the mother archetype and append the qualifier "... not!"

We also have, each of us in our conscious mind, structures that can pull against the dictates of the unconscious archetypes. In this day of rampant feminism, we have all learned to expect different things of women and mothers than our archetypes might otherwise have us do.

What we project is accordingly inflected according to our culture and personal history. Today, our culture is in flux regarding women, wives, and mothers. Our personal histories are widely varied as a result. Whether we are male or female, young or old, we all have complicated histories with respect to how we image women.

Some of us see Sarah Palin as an "ideal" woman-wife-mother and say, "Right on! Such a person is just what the country needs right now."

Others of us see Palin as representing that same "ideal" woman-wife-mother and say, "No way! She'd set the clock back a hundred years on feminism, women's rights, and a lot of other things."

All the lionizing of Palin from the right, and all the disparagement from the left, are tinged with whether we like or dislike the woman we see in the light of our projections. If Sarah Palin were Abraham Palin, with the same (thin) résumé, McCain's pick for vice president would still draw criticism, à la Dan Quayle. But not nearly as stridently.


P.S. For another take on the archetypal Sarah Palin, see The Projection of Sarah Palin at the Symbol Watcher website. This one casts Palin in the role of the Great Mother archetype: "at once container, cherisher and guardian of life, as well as ruler, possessive controller/destroyer and seductress." Interesting reading!

Let's Focus on What's Important

Yours truly, oldstyleliberal, thinks we all need to stop, take a deep breath, and retract our claws. This year's election campaign is setting all-time records for nastiness and ugliness, just when we need to keep our focus on important issues.

There is big trouble on the fiscal horizon. In his most recent Sunday op-ed piece, "The Next President's Due Bill," Washington Post columnist David Broder notes that according to the Congressional Budget Office, "the next president, whoever he is, will probably inherit a budget that is at least $500 billion out of balance — a record sum that will limit his ability to do any of the wonderful things being promised daily in the upbeat rhetoric of the campaign."

According to this report by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center:

Although both candidates have at times stressed fiscal responsibility, their specific non-health tax proposals would reduce tax revenues by an estimated $4.2 trillion (McCain) and $2.9 trillion (Obama) over the next 10 years. Both candidates argue that their proposals should be scored against a "current policy" baseline instead of current law. Such a baseline assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts would be extended and the AMT patch made permanent. Against current policy, Senator Obama's proposals would raise $600 billion and Senator McCain's proposals lose a similar amount.

And Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby summarized that in this recent piece:

According to the Tax Policy Center, over the course of a decade Obama's plan would result in a national debt $1.2 trillion smaller than you would get under McCain's plan.

We talk about the national debt in terms of changes and increments — plus or minus $1.2 trillion or so — because it's too huge to imagine in absolute terms. (To see how huge, click here.) The national debt — the nation's outstanding public debt — is the federal government's "accumulated deficits plus accumulated off-budget surpluses" (see this web page). When U.S. budget deficits grow, as they have done precipitously this year due to rising expenditures and falling tax revenues in an economic downturn, the national debt grows. And 22.7% of this debt is now owed outside the U.S. to foreign governments and international organizations (see here).

According to this article by Jeremy J. Siegel at Kiplinger.com, the ceiling on the national debt is about to be increased by Congress to $10.6 trillion dollars. This is not in itself bad, even if a lot of the money is owed to China and others: "Although our national debt is large, the annual output of the U.S. economy -- our gross domestic product -- now exceeds $14 trillion. With a national debt now totaling $9 trillion, the ratio of debt to GDP is only 63%."

So we can afford to carry a national debt this high, but even so, Siegel says, "The nation's debt will grow rapidly over the next two decades as entitlement spending surges to meet the demands of more than 80 million retiring baby-boomers." That's the "real debt crisis" we are going to be facing soon.

That's why "Defending the Insiders: Change in Washington? Not Without Them," Norman J. Ornstein's column in today's Post is must reading. Ornstein, one of those much-reviled "Washington insiders" for many, many years, says the key initiatives undertaken by the next president and Congress

... have to come in reforming our large entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — to cope with explosive growth in the number of older people. Change to these programs would mean pain for large numbers of voters. As that late, great Washington insider Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted long ago, serious reform of entitlements, absent an immediate meltdown, can only occur if there is broad, bipartisan cover from leaders on the left, center and right, from Democrats and Republicans, from inside Congress and key interest groups such as AARP and the business community.

That kind of consensus is forged through the political process. It's done by finding allies and building coalitions via intense bargaining and politicking. The skills needed are far more likely to be possessed by Washington insiders than iconoclastic outside reformers.

In other words, we can't really afford the kind of "change" both candidates are now offering the country, if "change" means a radical shift toward either the left or the right. The kind of "change" we actually need is one that greases the wheels for broad consensus — for meeting in the middle. Washington insiders can be our most precious facilitators in this, but only if the political hatreds this election seems to be breeding can be set aside.

So, as I say, can we all just retract our claws?

"Heed lessons of '72"

Religious studies professor Ira Chernus writes in "Heed lessons of '72," an op-ed piece in today's Baltimore Sun, that the Democratic Party of 2008 must avoid making the same mistake it did in 1972. In that year Democrats nominated the antiwar candidate George McGovern as their presidential standardbearer. Most Americans were by that time against the Vietnam War, but instead of backing McGovern, they reelected Richard Nixon in a landslide.

Republicans tarred McGovern as the candidate of "acid, amnesty, and abortion." LSD, known as "acid," was the drug of choice in the ostentatious counterculture of the day. The political radicals of the era were calling for amnesty for draft resisters. The following year, 1973, would find a liberal Supreme Court upholding a woman's constitutional "right to choose" in Roe v. Wade.

Chernus writes that the main reason McGovern lost was the insistence of insiders in the Democratic Party power structure that the platform McGovern would run on should contain a strong antiwar plank. Meanwhile, Nixon ran on a pledge to wind the war down gradually, while preserving America's "honor" — a code word, Chernus points out, for "keeping the nation's moorings in familiar cultural traditions of the past."

Chernus thinks this year's presidential contest parallels that one. Most voters actually oppose the Iraq War, but there is great danger that the skin color or unusual name and family background of Barack Obama will trigger a victory for war hero John McCain nevertheless, particularly if McCain is handed strong antiwar language in the Democratic platform on which he can embroider code words to draw votes from those who fear too much "change" in America too soon.

This analysis interests your blogger oldstyleliberal greatly, in part because he thinks it's correct, and in part because it reveals something profound about human nature. Most people want peace, preferring it in the abstract to war hands down. What's more, most people think this war is a mistake. Yet such sentiments take a back seat to an inchoate fear that coming out strongly against the war is the sign of a candidate who is more of a "goody goody" than America is ready for.

So people want to keep the "better angels of our nature" on a short leash. The "liberal" politics that promises to fulfill our human longing for peace (or justice, or equality, or unfettered liberty) needs to be restrained, lest America grow flabby and weak. We do not dare be more "goody goody" than our enemies, or they will have us for breakfast.

When push comes to shove, fear trumps our "better angels" every time.

Voters split over McCain, Obama views on Iraq

Voters split over McCain, Obama views on Iraq is an article that has recently appeared in Yahoo! News. Worth reading, it pretty accurately reflects the crazy, mixed up sentiments of voters this year about the war in Iraq, oldstyleliberal thinks.

Clearly, the fact that sizable voter majorities think the war was a mistake does not help Senator Obama all that much. Senator McCain gets high marks for his seeming to be the better military leader, even though (or perhaps because) he vocally supports the war:

"He's more experienced militarily," said Ann Burkes, a registered Democrat and retired third-grade teacher from Broken Arrow, Okla. "And I don't know if I agree with [his] stay-the-course (policy), but I think the good probably outweighs the bad with him, experience-wise." ...

Leeann Ormsbee, a registered Democrat from Waterford, Pa., believes the United States rushed to war, but now does not believe troops should simply withdraw. The 29-year-old self-employed house cleaner says she has never voted for a Republican. She might this time.

"I do believe that he will do better in Iraq," she said of McCain. "Because he's served in the military and he has said we can't just pull out. ... I think we're just kind of stuck with it now and we have to finish."

Republican pollster Neil Newhouse calls these voters "nose-holders."

"They don't like the fact that we're over there, they don't think the decision was the right one, but they understand that if we simply withdraw our troops it would leave things worse off," he said.

The belief of yours truly, oldstyleliberal, is that things will eventually be worse off if we stay. oldstyleliberal believes that sooner or later, war begets war and violence begets vengeance.

Without fail, killing desensitizes the soul — whether one does it or merely witnesses it. And watching your comrades get killed spurs a desire for revenge. Put the two together, and you have a sure recipe for future violence.

The violent future can, however, be delayed. Those Iraqis who would seize power, terrorize their countrymen, and generally exact revenge for the last several years of killing may just be biding their time until a Democratic president enters the White House and cuts U.S. troop strength over there.

Which means that if we cross them up and elect the hawkish McCain instead, there may be a surge of postponed Iraqi atrocities coming to the fore at that time, provoking a President McCain to hit back even harder than ever, thereby stoking the resentment mill even further in Iraq.

War begets war. Violence begets revenge. It is an Iron Law of human behavior.

So Obama is right. We need to withdraw as expeditiously as we can, given the need for preventing the withdrawal itself from provoking additional chaos.

Once we are out of Iraq, we can expect to witness the ghastly sight of innumerable chickens coming home to roost in that country, and being slaughtered ... just as happened in Vietnam after the last American helicopter lifted off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

Americans such as those mentioned in the article who oppose the war, but also oppose withdrawal, are hoping in vain that something good will happen between now and when we finally do pull the plug ... something that will cancel the balance long overdue for vengeance in Iraq.

oldstyleliberal feels their reluctance to face facts and insist on ending the war will make for a worse outcome, not a better one.

Jim Webb for Veep!

Check out Joe Klein's latest column for TIME, "Getting to Know Jim Webb." Though he won't say so right out loud, Klein thinks Webb, the recently elected senator from Virginia and a Democrat, is the clear top choice as Barack Obama's running mate in the November presidential election.



oldstyleliberal agrees. Webb served with distinction in Vietnam and, as a Republican, became President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Navy. He switched to the Democratic Party because he feels "it is now the Republican Party that most glaringly does not understand the true nature of military service." Klein says Webb, in his recent book A Time to Fight, "takes a well-calibrated ... swing at the Bush Administration's naive neoconservative foreign policy — after all, Webb opposed going to war in Iraq in a 2002 Washington Post Op-Ed piece."

I like the fact that Webb could not be more sympathetic to and supportive of those who serve in uniform, those who have so served in the past, their families, and their general culture ... which ties in closely with Scots-Irish working class from which Webb himself proudly hails. My own family's roots are likewise to be found in this slice of the American soil.

I also like something else Klein quotes from Webb's book:

"The ultimate question," Webb writes about Democrats and the military, "is this: When you look at a veteran, what do you see? Do you see a strong individual who overcame the most difficult challenges most human beings can face ... or do you see a victim?" But if some Democrats tend to pity members of the armed forces, the Republican Party "continually seeks to politicize military service for its own ends even as it uses their sacrifices as a political shield against criticism for its failed policies. And in that sense, it is now the Republican Party that most glaringly does not understand the true nature of military service."

As some of my recent posts have indicated, on Memorial Day Weekend of 2008 I "saw the light," becoming, in my heart, a pacifist. I now oppose the Iraq War, and all wars from this point forward, as being insane. This does not mean, however, that I despise — or pity — the military. Jim Webb may or may not agree with me that we should never fight another war unless we're attacked. But I agree with him that the values of duty, honor, and personal sacrifice which the military stands for are the best things about America and should be revered by its political class, not exploited for the civilian leaders' own twisted ideological purposes.

So I think Barack Obama will have to look long and hard before he'll be able to find a better running mate than Senator James Webb, Democrat of Virginia.

Who Will Listen?

A controversial recent offering from columnist Kathleen Parker, "Getting Bubba," brings out what may be the driving force of Election '08. It once could be called "class resentment," but it's broader than that today.

What is it? The takeoff point to understanding it is embodied in the negativity some voters bear toward Senator Barack Obama, in that he does not impress them as a "full-blooded American."

This seems to be about more than his mixed race. Senator Obama's mother was herself a "full-blooded" (in her case, white) American. She was of no particular religion but had great respect for all religions, meaning that she herself was a freethinker, already out of step with mainstream American religious values. Most American religions tend to be more close-minded, truth be told. Obama's father was a Kenyan, a black African, whose religious background was Muslim.

This also seems to be about more than economic strata, since Obama does not come from wealth.

And it is not much about gender, since Democrats who are fleeing the uncertainty they feel about Obama are running to the supposed safe haven of ... Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

What is it about? Parker puts it this way:

Politics may no longer be so much about race and gender as about heritage, core values, and made-in-America. Just as we once and still have a cultural divide in this country, we now have a patriot divide.

True enough, but it's a culture divide, too. Obama got into trouble for talking about disaffected working Americans who assuage their bitterness by "clinging" to their religion and their guns. At root, the dispute was over cultural differences, not just differences about patriotism.

Obama was likewise in trouble several months ago with African Americans who worried that he's "not black enough." That criticism seems to have died down for now. Yet it pointed to the same kind of anxiety as felt today by working class whites: will this man listen to us?

Or is he too much of an elitist?

It seems to me, the oldstyleliberal who writes this blog, that I myself have been too much of an elitist of late, too inclined to think in terms of wonky positions on issues like health insurance or the war in Iraq, to recognize that my fellow Americans are crying out from their respective communities and armed camps for some unifying national leader to take them seriously and pay them heed.

Meanwhile, the elites are urging upon us an enlightened, multicultural, manifestly relativistic agenda for sweeping change: bold strides along the "information superhighway" into an uncharted future. In that bright future as the educated elites see it, we will all be able to just get along because we will have put aside the benighted, old-fashioned, insular, absolutist beliefs to which we used to cling so desperately.

There are two kinds of American today. One American clings to the old absolutes (never mind that they may be different absolutes, depending on what group he owes his allegiance to). The other American sees all truth as relative, slippery, changeable.

For the old American, the prime value is just that: constancy of allegiance. For the new American, allegiance is itself negotiable.

The American whose constant allegiance is to the old ways is Bubba. Bubba thinks no one up there is listening to him ... and he's right about that. For the bright elites, listening to Bubba would just derail the glorious future they want to hasten into existence. The bright elites must pretend to listen to Bubba, of course, since they need Bubba's vote. But once in office, they'll have their own elitist agendas to see to.

That's why Bubba is so wary of Barack.

Boomers planting a debt bomb -- baltimoresun.com

Baltimore Sun financial columnist Jay Hancock writes in today's "Boomers planting a debt bomb" of the impending disaster that today's spendthrift ways will become for post-boomers:

The biggest U.S. financial crisis isn't the housing crunch. It's the government debt bomb being planted by baby boomers to explode in the faces of their children and grandchildren ...

The country already owes $9 trillion, a record, and almost half of it to foreigners, also a record. [The U.S. government] pays more in interest [on the national debt] than the annual cost of the Iraq war.

By the middle of this century, 20 percent of the national income — not just a fifth of the budget but a fifth of the whole economy! — will have to be diverted to pay interest on the debt ... . Another 20 percent will be needed to finance health care and pensions for boomer geezers.

That'll leave virtually nothing for education, roads, basic research and other investments that make the country great.

Oh, wonderful! Not only do we have to worry about the threat of global warming and the need to wean ourselves off foreign oil, we have to stop spending so much money into the bargain. Or everything will go bust.

Only problem is, not only do liberals like to spend money, so do today's conservatives à la George W. Bush.

oldstyleliberal sees little evidence that either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton can fix this. They are, after all, liberals.

Nor does one, such as oldstyleliberal, who hopes to seem wise, tend to feel that John McCain — he who is willing to keep troops in Iraq for the next 99 years, and hang the cost — has a handle on the impending meltdown of the federal budget.

All of the presidential hopefuls will, like oldstyleliberal, be long gone by mid-century. (Well, maybe the youngish Obama will be still here, in his geezer-hood.) In fact, the next president, should he or she serve two terms, will be leaving office in 2017, just about the time that, the experts say, we will have begun to spend over 20 cents of every dollar of U.S. gross domestic product on health care alone.

That figure is due to go up to 25 cents on the GDP dollar by 2030. When the Hancock column talks about "20 percent ... to finance health care and pensions for boomer geezers" by mid-century, he means 20 percent of the federal budget, and it doesn't include private expenditures on health care/health insurance.


All of this, of course, pales in insignificance compared to whether Sen. Obama ought to wear a flag lapel pin or Sen. Clinton is fighting too dirty a campaign.

We hear more about how Sen. McCain is supposedly too soft on illegal immigrants than about how, with Sen. Lieberman, he has co-sponsored a bill that would put a down payment on quashing global warming.

McCain-Lieberman would set up a cap-and-trade system for reining in companies that spew too much carbon into the sky and rewarding companies whose carbon footprint is moderate and shrinking. But that's not a topic that commands our attention as voters; lapel pins are.

If the next president doesn't get a grip on our looming problems, we will know who to blame.

As Pogo used to say, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

2008 Election - SUSA Polling Suggests New Battleground States

Remember 2000? The Democratic candidate, Al Gore, got more of the popular vote than the Republican George W. Bush did, but lost the election in the Electoral College (with the help of the Supreme Court). This year, it looks like another ultra-close general election may be on tap, and it's not unimaginable that it will be the Democrat this time who'll need an electoral-vote edge, after possibly getting fewer popular votes than John McCain. We Democrats need to be prepared for that.

Trouble is, we Democrats are unlikely to know who exactly our 2008 presidential nominee will be until the 796 superdelegates make their individual choices at the Democratic National Convention, August 25-28 in Denver.

The superdelegates are Democratic members of Congress, governors, mayors, and state and national party leaders. Each superdelegate can vote for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, as they prefer. Some have already pledged for one, some for the other, and some have not tipped their hand. Once "committed" by announcing their own personal choice, they can still switch candidates at will if they feel the need. There is no rule or law that forces them to cast their vote a certain way.

As of Sunday, March 9, Clinton has a slight edge in committed superdelegates, 242-210, while more than 300 remain uncommitted.

Interesting fact: the identities of only 719 of the 796 superdelegates are presently known. A group of 77 "add-on" superdelegates will be named later by state party leaders. The Obama-Clinton race may wind up in the laps of those 77.

Another interesting fact: if the delegations from Florida and Michigan wind up not being seated at the convention — they've been barred because their states violated party rules and scheduled too-early primaries — neither will Florida and Michigan superdelegates. But if some kind of deal is struck by which those two delegations get seated after all, then an as-yet-undetermined number of superdelegates from those states would be added to the current total of 796 — and their votes could end up picking the nominee.

Unless either Clinton or Obama takes all the remaining primaries/caucuses by large margins, then even in the wake of Clinton's victories in Ohio and Texas on March 4 it looks as if neither candidate can amass enough elected, pledged delegates to sideline the superdelegates at the convention.


How should the superdelegates decide how to vote?

2008 Election - SUSA Polling Suggests New Battleground States gets at what oldstyleliberal thinks the superdelegates ought to be thinking about when they decide. Specifically, they ought collectively to try to vote for the candidate most likely to lick John McCain in the Electoral College in the crucial battleground states.

Says the SUSA (SurveyUSA) pollster, "McCain leads [Obama] in the blue states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey while Obama leads [McCain] in the red states of Virginia, Ohio, North Dakota, Nevada, and Colorado." Meanwhile, "McCain leads [Clinton] in the blue states Washington, Oregon, and Michigan while Clinton leads [McCain] in the red states Florida, Ohio, West Virginia, and Arkansas. McCain leads [Clinton in] two of the three purple states, but trails Clinton in the neighboring purple state of New Mexico."

The "purple states" are the three states that changed parties in 2004's Bush vs. Kerry election, vis-à-vis how they voted in the 2000 Bush-Gore election: New Mexico (which went for Gore in 2000), Iowa (for Gore in 2000), and New Hampshire (Bush in 2000).

If these precise SUSA polling results hold up over time — and no one really sees that as coming about — Obama looks to be the better choice for Democrats concerned about winning Virginia, North Dakota, Nevada, and Colorado in November. Clinton looks to be the better choice if Florida, West Virginia, Arkansas, and New Mexico are held in focus. Both Democrats look like McCain-beaters in 2008 in Ohio. And so on.


Obviously, it's too soon to know for sure how Obama or Clinton would actually do against their Republican foe in all the various states in November. This particular early poll was of too few voters and had too wide a margin of error to be determinative. The point oldstyleliberal would like to make is that, come August, each superdelegate first of all needs to figure whether his or her state will be one of the close-fought ones in November.

If so, then that superdelegate ought to consider how Clinton and Obama will poll against McCain in his or her home state, and vote for the Democrat that can be expected to be most likely to take that state's electoral votes.

That is, each superdelegate from a battleground state should vote for whichever candidate they think has the best likelihood of keeping their own state's electoral votes from going to McCain.

Notice that this is not necessarily the same thing as knowing which candidate, Obama or Clinton, is the more favored by Democrats in the superdelegate's home state. It may be that Democrats in (say) Ohio prefer Clinton, yet Obama might be the better choice as McCain's opponent in Ohio because he could pull more independents, crossovers, and marginal voters into his column in the general election.

Unfortunately for Clinton, there seem to be few if any states where she would be expected to run stronger than Obama with independents, crossovers, and marginal voters such as young adults who typically don't vote, and who might or might not turn out. It is hard to find a state whose primary/caucus voters favored Obama but whose superdelegates ought to back Clinton as the more likely McCain killer.

So unless it somehow becomes clear that the electoral vote in November will turn on one or two swing states where Clinton does in fact stand a better chance than Obama against McCain — if such states exist — then superdelegates in general ought to lean toward Obama.

Accordingly, each superdelegate from a non-battleground state might wish to choose to make an estimate of each candidate's viability in the key battleground states specifically. The Democrat who polls best against McCain in those swing states will likely get more electoral votes in the November election than the other Democratic possibility would receive. Hence, the non-swing-states superdelegates might want to try to throw the nomination to that candidate — who, per the above analysis, is more likely to be Obama than Clinton.


Clearly, it will be pretty hard for any given superdelegate to presume to know how Clinton or Obama will do against McCain in the whole of the Electoral College, once all the people have voted in a close election on November 4. Given the cloudiness of everyone's crystal ball, oldstyleliberal thinks that if a superdelegate is from what will clearly be a battleground state, he or she still ought simply to vote for the Democrat who will be most likely to beat McCain in that state.

As a practical matter the other superdelegates, the ones from states that will probably not be close, might still want to vote for the Democrat who will poll better against McCain in their own states. For instance, the Democratic governor of oldstyleliberal's home state of Maryland, Martin O'Malley, will be a superdelegate. He might opt to vote for whichever candidate, Obama or Clinton, would more certainly prevail in Maryland against McCain, in the unlikely event that huge numbers of Republican voters come out of the woodwork and make the race close in the Old Line State.

That way, O'Malley and the other Maryland superdelegates could avoid having to psych out the likely Electoral College results in the other 49 states, a Herculean task.

So there are several possible alternative strategies open to superdelegates who aim to angle their convention votes in August toward an Electoral College victory in November. oldstyleliberal admits he does not know exactly which micro-strategy for choosing between Clinton and Obama is most likely to pay off in November, given all the clouds in the crystal ball. Still, being ever-mindful of the electoral vote in the general election seems to oldstyleliberal the best way for the superdelegates to carry out their unprecedented duty to actually choose the Democratic nominee.