Required Reading
1) From Daily Kos, “McCain Aide Says U.S. is ‘Nation of Whiners’ in a ‘Mental Recession’” by “Dansac”
That sound you’ve been hearing all day is me hitting my head in Boston with a baseball bat, trying to forget all the silly things the McCain campaign has done this week. First, McCain surrogate Carly Fiorina engaged in some freelance idiocy as she riffed on abortion. Next the candidate himself made some intemperate remarks about social security and killing Iranians. The former will almost surely come back in the form of an Obama advertisement in the fall, and may even surpass “100 years” as McCain’s biggest misstatement of 2008. Now, ranking McCain economic advisor Phil Gramm has told America to stop whining about the economy while pronouncing the country in the throes of a "mental recession." Brilliant.
Mind you, all these hijinks came on the heels of Monday’s planned stupidity of putting Team McCain’s economic focus on balancing the budget. At the time, I declared the McCain economic plan a car-wreck featuring the Concord Coalition and the Jack Kemp/Phil Gramm wing of the party. So I guess it’s only fitting that if the Warren Rudman types gave the campaign a black eye at the start of the week, Phil Gramm had his own sort of fun towards the end of the week. For a taste of the kind of mirth the left will have with this misstep, I encourage you to check out the Daily Kos diary linked above.
What makes this situation especially galling is that the Kos Kid is right. Contra Gramm, there are fundamental problems with the economy that have given the American people a serious case of agita. Many Americans have seen the value of their homes depreciate dramatically in recent times. They’ve also seen a huge increase in fuel prices. Both of these situations are beyond the typical American’s power to address. Unlike the late 1990’s when a market player could respond to the diminishing value of his PimentoLoaf.com stock by dumping it, most Americans can’t simply unload their houses. Nor can they, contrary to the wish of many a lefty blogger, move to an urban area and begin bicycling to work in order to reduce their fuel consumption. Refraining from heating their homes this coming winter is also unlikely to be a well-received option.
The causes of the insecurity are real, and the diminishment of the typical American’s economic situation is equally real. What makes the McCain camp’s antics this week all the more mysterious is there’s no reason why McCain has to reflexively defend the status quo. What’s more, doing so goes against all of his principles. Remember back in the primary season when McCain commented that some people on Wall Street had to go to jail and demonized the pharmaceuticals? That’s the real McCain, and while not a particularly attractive McCain to these eyes, it’s also likely to be a more successful McCain.
So where does this week of living foolishly leave the McCain campaign? I say the following as someone who very much wants to see McCain win – he and his team have to do better. That means no more wisecracking, no more undisciplined surrogates, and a fresh cognizance on the candidate’s part that he’s playing a bigger room than he has in the past and to professionalize his act accordingly. The world now watches Senator McCain’s every move – the stuff that tickled the ribs of eager reporters on the Straight Talk Express in 2000 doesn’t necessarily remain appropriate.
At least to McCain’s credit, he has wisely thrown Phil Gramm under the bus. Asked about Gramm’s possible future in a McCain administration, McCain said, “I think Senator Gramm would be in serious consideration for ambassador to Belarus, although I'm not sure the citizens of Minsk would welcome that."
2) From the New York Times, “The Audacity of Listening” by Gail Collins.
Yes, I’m recommending a Gail Collins column, but only to show the contortions Obama-philes are having to go through to stand by their Messiah.
Whenever you do an extremely positive review of a book or a movie or some other entertainment vehicle (like a gaffe-prone political candidacy), you have to offer a “yeah but” paragraph near the end, usually in the penultimate paragraph, to let the reader know that even though you’re kvelling about something, you’re still aware of its flaws. So a “yeah but” paragraph in a review calling “The Godfather” the best movie ever, you might acknowledge weaknesses in the film like James Caan being in fact Jewish and not Italian.
The point of Collins' column is that Obama isn’t really a flip-flopper. But note how the strength of her “yeah but” passage completely undermines this contention:
Most of the things Obama’s taken heat for saying this summer fall into these two familiar patterns — attempts to find a rational common ground on controversial issues and dumb-avoidance… Touching both bases are Obama’s positions that 1) if people are going to ask him every day why he’s not wearing a flag pin, it’s easier to just wear the pin, for heaven’s sake, and 2) there’s nothing to be gained by getting into a fight over whether the death penalty can be imposed on child rapists. His decision to ditch public campaign financing, on the other hand, was nothing but a complete, total, purebred flip-flop.
Know intellectual confusion!
3) From the Wall Street Journal, “Barack’s Brilliant Ground Game” by Karl Rove.
I have to be honest – for me, reading Karl Rove ramble about a campaign’s “ground game” is even less interesting than reading Glenn Greenwald go on and on (and on and on and on) about FISA. Still, after all the boring blather about the Obama campaign’s nuts-and-bolts, Rove offers this sterling insight:
Instead of consistency, Mr. Obama has followed Richard Nixon's advice, to cater to his party's extreme in the primaries and then move aggressively to the middle for the fall.
In the primary, Mr. Obama supported pulling out of Iraq within 16 months, called the D.C. gun ban constitutional, backed the subjection of telecom companies to expensive lawsuits for cooperating in the terror surveillance program, opposed welfare reform, pledged to renegotiate Nafta, disavowed free trade and was strongly against the death penalty in all cases. But in the past few weeks, Mr. Obama has reversed course on all of these, discarding fringe liberal views for relentlessly centrist positions. He also flip-flopped on accepting public financing and condemning negative ads from third party groups, like unions.
By taking Nixon's advice, Mr. Obama is assuming such dramatic reversals will somehow avoid voter scrutiny. But
people are watching closely, and by setting a world indoor record for jettisoning past positions, Mr. Obama may be risking his reputation for truthfulness. A candidate's credibility, once lost, is very hard to restore, regardless of how fine an organization he has built.
This is what I’ve been saying in private conversations all week – Obama is trading his campaign’s central narrative for tactical repositioning on a handful of issues. So the next question is why? My sense is the Obama campaign is making these moves out of a sense of profound concern if not desperation. Given the dynamics of this year’s election and the stumblebum ways of the McCain campaign, you’d figure Obama would be winning by 15-20 points. Today’s Rasmussen tracking has Obama’s lead at 3. Perhaps it’s the Obama campaign that feels the most pressing need to change the game.
The world’s most pathetic oligopoly is trying to blame SPECULATORS (bugga-bugga!)for the high cost of air travel. From the “Open letter” email that arrived in my Inbox from United Airlines:
“Twenty years ago, 21 percent of oil contracts were purchased by speculators who trade oil on paper with no intention of ever taking delivery. Today, oil speculators purchase 66 percent of all oil futures contracts, and that reflects just the transactions that are known. Speculators buy up large amounts of oil and then sell it to each other again and again. A barrel of oil may trade 20-plus times before it is delivered and used; the price goes up with each trade and consumers pick up the final tab. Some market experts estimate that current prices reflect as much as $30 to $60 per barrel in unnecessary speculative costs.” (Emphasis added)
Of course most market experts “estimate” no such thing, but that inconvenient fact somehow didn’t make it into the open letter.
I tried contacting Dave Barger, the CEO of JetBlue and one of the letters co-signers. He wasn’t taking calls on this matter. In my conversation with an airline spokesman, I tried to wedge in a bit of substance asking, “Isn’t it true that for every speculator who wagers on the price of oil going up, another speculator has to wager on the price of oil going down?” I was referred once again to the StopOilSpeculationNow.com website, which oddly didn’t address this most basic futures market fact.
Perhaps the airlines realize that once their mismanagement necessitates another round of government bailouts, the public will finally just say, “Let them fail and be replaced by competent companies.” So in a way this pathetic and inaccurate scapegoating represents progress. The airlines realize they’re in trouble. Too bad they don’t also realize that they would be better off trying to straighten out their business models rather than engaging in pitiful demagoguery.
5) From Golf Digest, “How Healthy is Your Game” by Matthew Rudey
For golf lovers, this is a sobering report. Fewer people are playing golf now than when Tiger Woods hit the scene in a big way 11 years ago. What could be causing this?
Industry experts joust about the validity of participation survey results -- and even the golf business' overall prognosis -- but they agree on one major point: The game needs to find more players and encourage them to stick with a sport that can seem daunting for beginners.
"If you go back and read state-of-the-game stories from the 1920s, 1940s and 1960s, they have the same industry focus," says Steranka. "Time, money and skill are still the barriers to entering this game. We asked people to rate what the most important element of the golf experience was in terms of enjoying it, and it's hitting good shots."
Yet throughout the golf industry, courses are built to be “tests of golf.” So while the typical player finds the game way too hard, the typical course is built with the goal of being as difficult as possible. So the course architects and developers make their “tests of golf,” but they’re tests that the golfing public fails. Virtually every golf course renovation or so-called restoration makes the existing course significantly harder. And yet I don’t think I’ve ever heard a golfer leave a course saying, “That was no fun. The course was too easy and my score too good.”
I wrote a lengthy piece on golf course architecture roughly a year ago. You can find it here. Golf can be saved, but to save it the game’s stewards will have to remember that the game is supposed to be fun and not a test of the golfer’s spiritual endurance.