The cap-and-trade bill, if passed by the Senate and actually implemented over the next few decades, would do more damage to the country than any economic legislation passed in at least 100 years. It would eventually send most American manufacturing jobs overseas, reduce American competitiveness, and make Americans much poorer than they would have been without it.

The cap-and-trade bill will have little, if any, positive effect on the environment — in part because the countries that would take jobs from US industries tend to be bigger polluters. By making the US — and the world — poorer, it would probably reduce the world’s ability to develop technologies that might solve its environmental problems in the future.

Cap-and-trade is a joke—it is a policy that has already failed in Europe and in virtually guaranteed to fail here in the United States. By giving in to the demands of radical environmentalists, Congress is preparing to take our current recession and plunge it into depression.

As the media focuses once again on celebrity, the advent of the next Great Depression comes closer. Cap-and-trade is terrible policy enacted for foolish reasons, and we will all pay the price for it if we allow it to pass.

Rep. Pelosi has ended up making a laughingstock of herself—her desperate attempts to backpedal from her own words are Clintonian in audacity without the skill of Slick Willy. Even the mainstream press has caught on.

Krauthammer puts the political impact of all this succinctly:

The reason Pelosi raised no objection to waterboarding at the time, the reason the American people (who by 2004 knew what was going on) strongly reelected the man who ordered these interrogations, is not because she and the rest of the American people suffered a years-long moral psychosis from which they have just now awoken. It is because at that time they were aware of the existing conditions — our blindness to al-Qaeda’s plans, the urgency of the threat, the magnitude of the suffering that might be caused by a second 9/11, the likelihood that the interrogation would extract intelligence that President Obama’s own director of national intelligence now tells us was indeed “high-value information” — and concluded that on balance it was a reasonable response to a terrible threat.

And they were right.

In the end, that’s correct. The “torture” issue will never have legs because the average American doesn’t share the sense of moral outrage that some have over that issue. In war, bad things happen. People get killed. Killing is a moral wrong, yet it is part of the nature of warfare. In the same vein, a practice like waterboarding may be credibly called torture, and torture is a moral wrong. Yet it is also a part of war. Pelosi doesn’t care about the morality of torture, she wants to score political points for partisan reasons. Some have a legitimate, rational, and moral objection to these practices, but they are a distinct minority.

In the end, Pelosi’s dissembling masks the real issue here. Waterboarding someone who was directly responsible for the inhuman September 11 atrocity is morally and politically different than the mistreatment of detainees. The abuses of Abu Ghraib and others are examples of acts that harm America’s reputation and dishonor our military. Yet the focus is not on those acts, but on the waterboarding issue. Were this a moral rather than a political issue, detainee abuse would be placed in its full context, rather than being used as a truncheon against the Bush Administration.

Pelosi’s lies are political in nature, just like this whole attempt at a partisan witch-hunt. Even for those who legitimately and truly oppose torture, tying their wagons to such a despicably partisan crusade only undercuts the seriousness of their position. If the anti-torture campaign will be spearheaded by outright liars like Rep. Pelosi, it will never be taken seriously.

The problem for Specter is that there’s a good chance that he won’t win the Democratic primary. As NRO’s Jim Geraghty notes, why would the Democrats want a former Republican with a lifetime ACU rating in the 40s who opposes the union-backed “Employee Free Choice Act” and has ties with President Bush? Pennsylvania Democrats don’t need Arlen Specter nearly as much as Arlen Specter needs Pennsylvania Democrats.

The GOP should have gotten rid of Specter in 2004 when they had the chance. Specter’s claim that the GOP has moved too far to the right is based largely on his vote on the stimulus bill—which is opposed by far more than just Republicans. The GOP needs to remake its image, and jettisoning the old guard is probably better in the long run. What is needed now is a party that is more self-confident in their ideology and in their policies. The GOP right now is at war with “moderates” who barely identify with Republican principles and hard-liners who have failed to identify with the American people. That’s not a good position for a party to be in, especially not with a Democratic Congress and a President who could be caught on national TV greedily consuming a mewling infant and still get a 60% approval rating.

The GOP needs to get its act together and fast. Doing so without excess baggage is probably better over the long term, even if it is a huge problem over the short term. Specter was not the sort of person who could motivate the GOP base or the American people. His party switch hurts the Republicans in the short term, to be sure. But it is quite possible than even this Hail Mary play won’t be enough for Specter to keep his political career afloat.

That may seem like hyperbole, but there’s more than enough evidence to suggest that it’s true. Look at the definition of socialism from that font of all knowledge: Wikipedia:

Socialism refers to a broad set of economic theories of social organization advocating public or state ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods, and a society characterized by equality for all individuals, with a fair or egalitarian method of compensation.

Let’s assume that definition is roughly accurate. Does the U.S. fall under that definition?

Well, we now have a system in which the government has a controlling interest in several major sectors of the U.S. economy. Whether the banking system is officially nationalized or not is largely irrelevant—it has already been de facto nationalized. The U.S. government now has effective control over all of AIGs operations, right up to the the amount that it may pay its workers. At least for a huge swath of the financial sector, the government has effective control.

Now, President Obama has set his sights on the auto industry, essentially firing GM’s president. The fact that the President just ordered an official of a private company to step down should be deeply troubling to all. What if President Bush had demanded that the Democratic president of a major arms manufacturer resign? The left would have been in an uproar. Regardless of Wagoner’s competency, to have the President of the United States order a private company to fire an employee should not happen in our system. The government is now calling the shots at GM. This isn’t forced nationalization, but like AIG, GM and Chrysler are now de facto state-run enterprises.

The government now controls the means of production in two huge swaths of two major industries. Even if we have not arrived at full-scale socialism yet, we are at the very least perilously close.

Economist Arnold Kling calls the current state of affairs “Progressive Socialism“—although it is really another version of state socialism. Socialism doesn’t require the government to own all the means of production (as does Communism), but merely to have effective control over the economy. Right now, the Obama Administration is effectively in the driver’s seat of the U.S. economy. Looking at the markets, it’s quite clear that the aimless direction that Obama is taking us is destroying trillions of dollars of actual value.

The Fall of Capitalism, The End of Freedom

Why should we care? The reason why the advent of American state socialism is such a problem is because political freedom and economic freedom are really two sides to the the same coin. As Janet Daley notes in The Telegraph an attack on capitalism is ultimately an attack on human freedom itself:

When we make the case for capitalism, we are defending the political principle of freedom, not arguing for one kind of rigid economic organisation over another. The debate is being hopelessly muddied by those late converts to free enterprise – politicians like Mr Brown who believe that markets should only survive if they can be made to serve Left-wing purposes.

Capitalism is premised on individual agency. Socialism is premised on the power of the state. The second we give government—which has the legal ability to use force—all of our economic power, what do we really have left? In essence, socialism is really a more “enlightened” form of feudalism in which the serfs trade their freedom for the protection of the elites.

The United State should not fall into the trap of socialism. Socialism is not a workable economic model. The larger and more diverse the nation, the more quickly socialism fails. Industrious and homogenous Sweden can ride out the problems of strong government control longer than could the large and diverse United States. If we continue down this road, our economic collapse will only get worse.

The United States has become a de facto socialist state, and the crisis on Wall Street is a reaction to this untenable and unsustainable trend. If we want to preserve our quality of life, we cannot have our economy being run by the same Washington apparatchiks who have caused this crisis in the first place. Obama’s shift of the U.S. economy to a more centralized and socialized one will lead this country ever closer to disaster.

McCain has an opportunity to take Obama out, and it looks like he is going to go for it. The way he can do this is to run against the “politics as usual” in Washington. His dangerous political gambit this week can pay off for him, but only if he makes it work tonight. That is his “must-do” for this debate.

Here is what he needs to say in his own words: the American people are sick and tired of politics as usual in this country. They are sick and tired of a lack of leadership from Washington. The choice to suspend the campaign was a necessary one because partisan politics has to come second and the country has to come first.

But moreover, he needs to go on the offensive. Here is what he can do to deliver the knockout punch. Republicans won’t like this, but it will help McCain win. The argument is this: for the last eight years we have had a political culture that put politics above country. Sen. Obama’s decision to carry on his campaign while the economy was collapsing was just like President Bush sitting back while the levees collapsed in New Orleans. President Bush said “heckuva job, Brownie.” Sen. Obama has Jim Johnson, one of the architects of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac disaster as his campaign advisor.

We don’t need another four years of politics first. When the country is in crisis, politicking is not the right response.

That will provoke Obama like nothing else. It may offend some Republicans, and it is somewhat unfair to President Bush. But McCain is not Bush and has to distance himself from the failures of the Bush Administration.

He can turn this whole series of events against Sen. Obama. He can make this debate a turning point. He can turn this into Obama’s Katrina, if he has the guts to do this. I know he does.

The question is will he?

UPDATE: Jim Geraghty thinks that agreeing to the debate was mistake as it undercuts McCain’s message. If a deal emerges today, perhaps not. It is a risky move, but that can be erased if McCain handles the aftermath well enough. Obama thinks he has the upper hand here, which means he’s going to go into this thing cocky. McCain needs to be able to turn that against him.

Of course, had Gov. Palin said something like this, the media would be making all sort of accusations about her competency. But given the way that the media covers for anyone with a D next to their name, most people will never here the stupid things that pours freely from Sen. Biden’s craw…

At first, I figured that there was no way that Obama could have been that stupid—he would never be dumb enough to make that big a gaffe. But in context, it does sound like he’s calling Palin a “pig” and then goes on to compare McCain to an “old fish.” That also seems to be the way that the audience interpreted it.

This was an incredibly dumb move by Obama. It was an unforced error, and comments like that are enough to sink a political career. Obama is a gifted rhetorician, but without the crutch of a teleprompter, he makes mistake after mistake after mistake. He’s as gaffe prone as President Bush, and now the media is starting to take notice of this.

Obama’s campaign is making mistakes at the worst time. Not accepting public financing means that he has to do 40 fundraisers this month—time that could have been spent on the campaign trail. What’s worse about that is that the message that a Democratic donor wants to hear is not going to be the message that a swing voter wants. Obama cannot afford to swing to the left now. but his need for cash forces him to play to two audiences while McCain can play to independents.

From the beginning, I’ve said that Obama has never run a truly competitive national race. The bruising primary with Clinton seemed to have shown that he could handle it. Now, I’m beginning to wonder how much of that victory was the collapse of Clinton rather than the skill of Obama. Obama has spent the first part of this week on the defensive, which is not where a candidate should be. He’s making errors, looking foolish, and undercutting his claim to be something more than your typical politician.

Obama’s idiotic “pig” comment doesn’t itself mean all that much. What it does suggest is that Obama’s mouth is becoming a problem for him—and with less than 60 days to go in this election, a major unforced error can be fatal.

UPDATE: The overly whiny way that Obama is handling this situation doesn’t suit him. Comparing this to “Swift Boating?” Is that any way to make this controversy go away?

Obama is clearly rattled now, and coming off as desperate and whiny doesn’t make Obama look like a strong leader. Obama does not play well on the defensive, and it shows.

These polls show that McCain did get a bounce from the RNC, and that this race is very fluid. It would not be surprising if these numbers get better for McCain by mid-week as weekend polls sometimes undercount Republicans.

I am going to go off on a limb and predict that Obama will underperform his polling numbers—just as he did in New Hampshire in January. I believe that there is a strong “bandwagon” effect among Obama voters and that McCain will actually peel away some of the Hillary voters that have “come home” to the Democrats after the DNC.

Watch the swing state vote—states like Colorado, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan will decide this election. Obama needs some of the key Western states to win. McCain must take Ohio and Florida to win. Obama has to hold all of Kerry’s states and peel off enough electoral votes for the red states to win.

If Pennsylvania goes to McCain, Obama is toast. He is unlikely to pull enough additional electoral votes to make up for that loss. If I were McCain, I’d be having Sarah Palin circling the Great Lakes states while McCain pulls Colorado, Nevada, and possibly New Mexico from Obama.

This race is completely up in the air. McCain has taken some of the wind out of Obama’s sails. He has an opportunity to run as an “agent of change” and beat the prevailing political climate. Obama is now on the defensive, and could lose. The debates will be critical, and the next two months will be some of the most exciting in American politics yet.

UPDATE: The latest Gallup/USA Today tracking poll has even better news for McCain: a lead of 10% in a survey of likely voters. That poll is likely an outlier, but there’s little doubt that McCain has gotten a bounce from his convention, and that Obama’s lead has evaporated.

UPDATE: Today (Sept. 8), McCain has a 3.2% lead in the RealClearPolitics average. All the major polls show the race either tied, or with McCain in the lead. There’s no doubt that McCain got a bounce from the convention, and that it was a substantial one. The question will be whether he can make the best of that momentum into Election Day.

To be bold, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Obama will underperform his polling numbers. The reasons aren’t as much due to race as the bandwagon effect. Some Clinton voters are “coming home” to Obama now, but they may tell the pollsters one thing, but do another. Remember Obama’s big lead in New Hampshire? As it turned out, the polls were wrong. I have a feeling that late breaking voters will break towards McCain. Voters who haven’t made up their minds tend to go to the “safe” choice, and here that choice is McCain—the more experienced candidate.

Much will be made of polling over the next 60 days, but polling is as much art as science. There’s plenty of reasons to think that conventional methodologies for political polling are breaking down. Polls give some indications of where things are headed, but they are in no ways dispositive.

Obama may have gotten a typical convention bounce, but he should be wiping the floor with McCain. An unpopular war, a deeply unpopular President, a Republican Party with an image problem—and yet Obama can only eke out a slender lead against McCain. McCain, to his credit, has proven to be a disciplined and effective candidate, and the results of the Presidential debates could be telling—there is a reason why Obama refused McCain’s invitation to do voter town halls.

One thing is clear: this race is not even close to over, and the predictions that Obama has this in the bag are unwarranted. McCain is much tougher than he appeared to be, and he could end up doing to Obama nationally what Clinton did to Obama in New Hampshire this winter.

That Obama was barely on the stage tonight.

Instead of soaring rhetoric, we got attacks. Instead of a compelling vision, we got what Obama is not. Instead of great lines, we got rhetoric that will not last beyond this election. This speech failed to satisfy.

Obama could have done better. This was a small speech on a momentous occasion. I honestly expected more from him. Even as a partisan, I can recognize great rhetoric when I see it, and this was not it. It was too small for him, and while some may love the red meat, this was not a speech for the ages.

On the other hand, perhaps it need not be. Obama wants to win the election, and that’s what this speech is about. The problem is that when Obama ran, he ran as a uniter. He ran as a post-partisan candidate. He leaves this speech as just another partisan.

UPDATE: Oddly enough, the conservative commentators on Fox News thought this was a great speech. My theory is that partisans seem to think that this was a great speech—because this speech was so partisan. The real question is whether this speech will attract the undecided.

On the other hand, generic Democrats are doing well in this bad year for Republicans. Obama has turned himself into a generic Democrat—which perhaps is enough for him. But I don’t think that’s enough.

I can accept that Obama took the “agent of change” mantle back, as several commentators have argued. The problem with that is that Obama’s appeal was that he was a post-partisan figure as well as an agent of change. He lost that tonight. It was a gamble, and perhaps it will pay off for him. But even as an admitted McCain partisan, I wanted to see a real vision beyond attacks and a laundry list of focus-group tested policies. Something real to spar with. That did not appear tonight, and that’s why Obama’s speech did not achieve what it should have.

Here is McCain’s challenge: let us accept that the American people have had “enough.” (Which is true.) But the American people don’t know what “change” Obama will bring—and McCain has to paint a compelling vision of what he will do that Obama will not.

That is something that McCain can do, but it will be a challenge. McCain does have a big job ahead of him, but the contrasts are clear.

UPDATE: In all fairness, the set was not merely as bad as I thought it would be. Granted, I watched PBS, which didn’t play with camera angles too much, but it didn’t really seem all that distracting. That and neo-classical architecture is my bag…

UPDATE: Wow, I’m really in the minority here. Even Jay Nordlinger thought the speech was good. The problem is that Obama had huge expectations placed before him. I can believe that this was a good partisan speech for the moment, but I don’t see it lasting. This wasn’t great oratory, from an orator who has the capability to truly inspire. Had a John Kerry or a Walter Mondale given this speech it might have been better in my eyes. But Barack Obama has more raw political talent than either. My biggest problem with this speech, my partisanship aside, is that Obama could have done better.

I haven’t read any of the excerpts of Obama’s speech, but I’m guessing that it will be 90% “hope” and “change” and 10% trying to paint America as some kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland. Obama is trying to associate McCain and Bush because he knows that he can’t win against John McCain. If McCain is smart, he’ll be able to change the game next week.

UPDATE: CNN is saying that this will be a “partisan” speech… so much for uniting the country, I guess.

8:58PM CST: How many times has Obama been compared to Lincoln… talk about audacity…

9:01PM CST: They’re doing a video tribute to Obama now. Gag me with a spoon.

Then again, given his paltry experience, at least the video should be short.

9:03PM CST: Obama’s mother woke him up at 4:30am to do his lessons? Does that strike anyone else as ever so slightly odd?

9:05PM CST: These videos are always fluff, but it’s good fluff for the candidates. The video does a good job of humanizing Obama, but it seems to highlight his lack of experience.

Norm Coleman was briefly in the video. Whoops. That must have Franken annoyed.

9:08PM CST: Barack talking about his mother’s death was touching. I also loved the bit about the astronauts. Very humanizing, and a great message. Too bad Obama’s policies are so wrong.

9:11PM CST: Overall, this is a very good video. It does a good job of introducing Obama and setting a positive theme. But will his speech match it?

9:14PM CST: Can he can the “thank you” and get on with the speech?

This is not a good start.

9:15PM CST: He gives a shout out to Hillary? But will it heal the wounds in the Democratic Party? Everyone’s thinking about female voters, but that wasn’t all of Hillary’s bloc.

9:17PM CST: We finally get to substance. And it’s about him. For all the talk about Obama’s supposed humility, he sure seems to talk about himself a lot.

9:18PM CST: And here we go with the pessimism. McCain needs a truly optimistic message to counter this.

9:19PM CST: Obama goes after Bush. I don’t think that this will go over well with independent voters. This is Democratic red meat, not a speech for the general electorate.

9:20PM CST: The insinuation that the government did nothing for Katrina is disgusting.

This is a negative and arrogant speech. It is not hopeful, it is partisan and vicious. This could easily backfire, and I hope it will. We don’t need this kind of mindless partisanship.

9:22PM CST: This speech is an attack speech, and it is not fitting for an event such as this. This is a momentous occasion, and Obama is making it small.

9:24PM CST: My guess: this speech is turning off a lot of people. It’s becoming increasingly shrill and bitter. You don’t spend 20 minutes on the attack when you should be talking about your vision for this country. This is a speech for the MoveOn.org crowd, not Main Street.

9:27PM CST: Negative. Shrill. Lacking in vision. This is not the Obama that inspires. This speech is flopping, and I can’t see independents going for this. What was the Obama team thinking?

9:29PM CST: Obama’s video was beautiful and inspiring. This speech is anything but. How could such a gifted rhetorician sink to such lows?

9:31PM CST: The speech is presenting a vision, but it’s too narrow. He’s gone from attacks to a laundry list. Where is the vision?

9:33PM CST: Obama wants to cut taxes. We’re all Reaganites now.

In 10 years we won’t use Middle Eastern oil? Without more drilling? How? By using the snake oil Sen. Obama is selling?

9:34PM CST: If drilling is a stopgap, then Obama supports more drilling? Then what makes him different than McCain? Of course drilling is a stopgap, but it’s a necessary one. The Democrats don’t want to drill.

9:35PM CST: This is not about small plans. Except for the ones I just spend the past 10 minutes talking about. A bold plan would be school vouchers, Senator, not kowtowing to teacher’s unions. There’s nothing but small plans here.

I’m disappointed. This is the worst Obama speech I’ve heard. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this is the time he should be hitting the rhetorical highs. Not giving us a laundry list.

9:38PM CST: I’m opening comments for this one. Play nice.

9:39PM CST: Each of us must do our part? For Obama, that means more government mandates.

I’ll give Obama this: he’s right on the importance of family, especially fathers. I like the individual responsibility part. but it’s just a footnote.

9:41PM CST: Obama goes for the antiwar line. If he wants to have a debate on national security, then let’s have it. Obama will lose.

End the war? The war is largely over. We won, and we won because we didn’t listen to small-minded people like you.

9:43PM CST: More attacks. Where is your vision, Senator?

I love how we’ve supposedly strained our alliances, when Europe has become far more pro-American than it was in 2003. And here Obama has been insulting our allies like Columbia.

9:45PM CST: Sen. Obama keeps making all these promises. He’ll really defeat disease?

This speech is 90% attacks and 10% hope and change. Guess I was wrong.

“They have not served a Red America or a Blue America…” at least Obama has one good line tonight.

But then he goes on the attack again.

What happened to Obama being a uniter? A post-partisan figure? This isn’t a uniting speech, this is a partisan speech.

9:49PM CST: Again, the implicit racism of saying that rural people can have guns, but urban people should not.

9:50PM CST: I’m really curious to see how this speech is going. How many times has Obama mentioned McCain? This wasn’t a speech about Obama’s vision, this was an attack speech. I think that Obama has seriously overcorrected here. Yes, the polls showed that Obama needed more substance—but Obama didn’t deliver that tonight. He replaced his hopeful rhetoric with attacks. I don’t see that working for him.

Invoking Dr. King just makes this speech smaller. Sen. Obama did give a speech full of fear and rancor—not the kind of unifying message that Dr. King gave us 45 years ago.

9:56PM CST: Obama ended on a strong note, but this speech was not the sort of speech that he needed tonight.

UPDATE: Obama mentioned McCain 21 times in this speech. If McCain is smart, he won’t mention Obama more than once or twice.

Apparently it’s really true.

After Obama’s Berlin speech, his numbers went down. Obama is overexposed, and turning his nomination speech into a kind of coronation is the exact sort of thing that has been causing Obama to hemorrhage support for the last few weeks. People don’t want to turn their politicians into secular messiahs—and that’s exactly what the Obama campaign has been trying to do.

The McCain camp is saying that Obama will get a 15 point bounce from the convention—trying to set expectations to unlikely highs. At this rate, I’m not so sure that Obama will get any bounce at all. He’s already got adulatory coverage for months on end—what more can he get from the media? When you’re already the media’s darling and MSNBC is at outreach of your campaign, there’s nowhere to go but down.

Obama will probably get some bump, but it won’t be 15 points, and it may not last long. I don’t see the Hillary supporters coming home this time, even with Hillary’s tepid praise for Obama last night.

Pride goes before a fall. Given the stratospheric heights to which Obama has been lofted, he should be more circumspect about how he runs his campaign. He wants to be the next Jack Kennedy—but he could end up an Adlai Stevenson.

UPDATE: After watching this video of the set, it looks like Sen. Obama is invoking the Markets of Trajan rather than a Greek temple. Then again, Trajan had military and executive experience, while Obama most assuredly has neither.

Biden has some qualities that make him a good pick, but not enough to make up for his infamous lack of inner monologue. His tendency to put foot firmly in mouth is not something that makes him condusive to being a running mate to a neophyte politician.

Biden is a Washington insider, which goes against Obama’s message of change. He is someone who offers experience, but at a price. Of all the top contenders for Obama’s VP, he is perhaps one of the weakest.

Biden makes sense on a superficial level, but when it comes to who best complements Obama, he’s not the best choice that could be made.

On the other hand, it could be worse: Obama could have picked Clinton.

UPDATE: It’s official, Biden is it. At least the Obama people had the good sense to drop the bad news on the weekend.

The conventional narrative is that the GOP brand is in the toilet, McCain is not an attractive candidate, and voters are hungry for “change.” The Democratic base is energized and the Republican base is demoralized. By all accounts, Obama should be beating McCain like a rented mule.

David Brooks hazards an answer: voters don’t know who Obama really is. It’s an interesting theory: Obama has a personal narrative, but it’s a postmodern one. As Brooks mentions, it’s as though he’s been grooming himself for higher office, but not ever really doing the things that are truly necessary. His lack of real experience and his stratospheric rise are connected and prevent him from either gaining or losing too much.

The Huntington Post has a piece that also asks whether Obama’s lack of substance is his Achilles Heel:

Despite the McCain campaign’s effectiveness, however, the best campaign against Barack Obama is not being run by his opponent, but by Barack Obama. It is Obama’s campaign that presents their candidate as an ever-changing work-in-progress. It is his own campaign that occludes our ability to know this man, depicting him as authentic as a pair of designer jeans.

Both analyses hit on something important: Obama is an unknown quantity. During the primaries he ran to the left of Hillary Clinton. Now, understandably, he’s run to the right. With McCain, voters know what they’re getting: he’s shifted his views somewhat (as all politicians do), but he’s done nothing like Obama’s pivots on public financing, FISA, offshore drilling, etc. A careful politician knows how to pivot without flip-flopping. For all of Obama’s personal magnetism, he’s not an experienced candidate.

Surprisingly, I agree with the Huffington Post article. Obama’s campaign is the best packaged and marketed campaign in modern political history. That is also it’s major flaw. The Obama team is in the process of building hype, but pure hype can’t improve a product. The iPhone was hyped, but largely delivered. Snakes on a Plane was the coolest thing ever until it actually came out and people realized it was as horrid as the title made it sound. Right now, the Obama campaign is closer to Snakes on a Plane than the iPhone.

McCain is the anti-candidate. In the end, his model works. Obama will clean up with young voters, liberals, and minorities. But that isn’t enough to win an election, not in an increasingly older country with independent voters who are up for grabs.

Obama has run a fascinating campaign that is well worthy of study and analysis—yet it is definitely underperforming. It isn’t the hype machine, the organization, or the technology that is failing to deliver, but a lack of real substance. Obama can continue to run the campaign he has, but it is the candidate and not the campaign that is causing the problems.

The cover is supposed to be a reflection on the supposed “right-wing smear machine” that the left loves to invent, but ends up being a case of friendly fire from the left wing. Its crude stereotype of both Obama and those with legitimate questions about his choice of associations manages to be offensive on a bipartisan level.

It is ironic that the ones that have been using the “fear tactics” that The New Yorker decries are not from the right. Sen. McCain treats Sen. Obama as He Who Must Not Be Middle-Named lest anyone accuse him of racism. The money spent by GOP-leaning 527 groups is a pittance compared to what is spent by groups like MoveOn.org, and the truly harsh attacks against Obama tended to come not from the “vast right-wing conspiracy” but from the paranoid mind of Sen. Clinton—who ironically enough invented the idea. Sen. Obama constantly lashes out against a “smear machine” which exists largely in the minds of the Senator and his supporters.

If Obama were smart, he would embrace his heritage and defuse the “Muslim” issue. The more he runs, the more he looks like he has something to hide. It seems unlikely that people who won’t vote for a candidate with a Muslim middle name are numerous enough to matter or sufficiently likely to vote for Sen. Obama to be bothered with. Obama should run on who he is—someone who is multicultural and can reach out to the rest of the world. The political costs of such a move are unlikely to hurt him, and the potential benefits are substantial. Why not proudly announce that he is Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a Kenyan Muslim who is a committed Christian and American, just as many Americans of foreign descent are? To hear him boldly proclaim his heritage defuses the issue and lets the political debate refocus on what matters—not false issues of patriotism, but substantive questions of judgement, integrity, and experience.

For example, he offers this message on taxes:

You pay plenty in taxes already. It’s not just about the cash, but about freedom. You need to invest in your business, pay your mortgage and pay for your kids’ education. Government already has too much money, and it spends it on mission-creep rather than the ‘public good.’ By the way, we are NOT going to increase taxes on your grandchildren by engaging in reckless debt spending, either.

That is the sort of message that the GOP needs to be sending. Confidence in government is at an all-time low—the Democratic argument that government is fundamentally broken, so let’s have more of it should be a non-starter. Obama’s great personal magnetism betrays yet another out-of-touch liberal.

But if the Republicans think that calling a spade a spade will win them the election, they’re dead wrong. Sticking Obama with the “liberal” label—even if richly deserved and completely accurate—is not going to be enough to swing the election. The GOP needs to have a real agenda.

Even though conservatives are balking at Sen. McCain’s efforts to speak out on global warming—and for good reason—at least he’s trying to set the agenda. The Lexington Project is the sort of forward-looking strategy that voters are looking for. The GOP needs to be a party of ideas, and the party leadership has to realize that calling the other guys names won’t work for them any more than it worked for the Democrats in 2002 and 2004. We need not only to say that we have conservative values, but make conservative values relevant to the American voter.

Why is a market approach better for health care? Because, as Mr. Greenhut explains, markets lower costs and make goods and services more available. But that isn’t enough, even though it’s true. What the GOP has always had a problem doing is taking those facts and turning them into a narrative. A market is an abstract concept… people respond to things that are within their own experience. The right narrative is that market-driven health care is like going to the neighborhood grocery store while government-run health care is like standing in a bread line. While that’s a rough analogy, it’s effective.

In a fair world, being a staunch conservative would be enough to win a Presidential election. This world isn’t fair, and politics is especially unfair. It is not enough to parade one’s conservative bona fides and call the other guy a liberal extremist. The way to win an election is to play, as Mr Greenhut puts it, to the “politics of aspiration.” For all the talk of the greatness of Ronald Reagan, the GOP seems to be having a tough time capturing the spirit of American optimism that motivated his campaign.

There is one thing that Mr. Greenhut is wrong about, though. This country shouldn’t be punished for the GOP’s transgressions. An Obama administration would be an unmitigated disaster for this nation. We don’t need another radical Supreme Court justice putting their whims above the rule of law. We don’t need higher taxes during an economic downturn. We can’t have radicals further using the machinery of the administrative state to reduce our freedoms even more. That doesn’t even touch on issues of free trade, energy policy, and other critical matters.

The GOP needs to get its act together. Years of fiscal irresponsibility and institutional incompetence have taken their toll on the Republican Party. The stakes in this election are too high not to embrace an agenda of substantive change. The GOP needs to not only stand on its values, but make those values accessible to those who don’t yet share them.

The GOP can win on the “politics of aspiration”—so long as they aspire to something higher than just skating by.

Now, I don’t think that Sen. Obama is the sort of type who will have his followers marching through Poland any time soon—but this kind of unthinking devotion to a candidate does not belong in a democratic system. The politics of personality is inherently anti-democratic as it puts the value of the leader above the value of the people.

It’s hardly unusual to see a candidate inspire their partisans—that’s what a good politician does. What is so unusual about Obama is the level of fervor that surrounds him. He is treated like a rock star in a way that even Clinton was not. The Obama campaign is less a traditional campaign that it is a movement. Political campaigns are, or at least should be, about ideals. The Obama movement is about nothing deeper than some vague vision of “change”—a value that could mean everything from marching through Poland to changing the national anthem to “Kumbaya” and inviting Osama bin Laden to a nationwide love-in. “Change” is an empty slogan, the intellectual equivalent of junk food—filling, but never offering anything of substance.

And if it were just about “change” there’s no reason to suspect that Obama would be ahead. Every candidate in this race talked about change. The real force behind the Obama campaign is not mere change, but force of personality. That is what gives Obama his political power, but it is also what makes him such a troubling force. We don’t need more uncritical worship of political figures in society, we need more individualism and vibrancy.

It’s as though Obama supporters have woken up with Brain Slugs attached to them. Instead of thinking rationally about the candidate, we have people people adopting his middle name on Facebook

. Instead of rationalizing one’s political choices, we have a bandwagon effect on a nightmare scale.

So what’s the problem? A few people have a political crush? It cuts deeper than that. Those who put their trust in politicians are quickly crushed—and make no mistake, Obama is nothing more than a typical politician when all the rhetoric is put aside. Just witness his contortions on gun control, and his change of heart on telecom immunity. Like any politician, he will say what needs to be said to get elected, and he is doing exactly what a jaded Washington insider would do—which is hardly change one can believe in. When his followers learn that he’s just another pol, all that energy and enthusiasm will quickly fade away and be replaced by even greater apathy—political movements based on personality typically do not last long.

Of course, the other alternative is more troubling. People who need a Leader tend not to be thinking all that rationally. At the risk of breaking Godwin’s Law yet again, even if Sen. Obama is far removed from the sort that would have people burning books, a cult of personality is not compatible with democracy. Not only that, but we’re already getting some disturbing indications of a mob mentality.

One should never put one’s trust in the political class. On one end it breeds disappointment, on the other zealotry. The Obama movement is the first real mass organized political movement of the 21st Century, and if it is the model for those to follow, American democracy may not emerge intact. It won’t be Obama who leads us there, but his little cult of personality is putting us down that path.

Despite all the rumors, fanned by Clinton herself today, I don’t see her as VP either. If Obama needs a woman, why not Gov. Katherine Sibelius of Kansas? If he needs to get someone who can resonate with red state voters, why not Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia? The “dream ticket” could just as easily be a nightmare—why share the stage with someone like Hillary Clinton? (Not to mention Bill…)

The other winner tonight is John McCain. Obama is an untested candidate who only just won a battle among his own party. Obama has made rookie mistakes, which can damn a candidate. Even an accomplished politico like John Kerry can die the death of a thousand cuts in a long campaign. Someone like Obama who has never had a competitive campaign outside a state legislative race faces a truly great challenge.

With luck, tonight ends the dominance of the Clinton machine—and good riddance. However, like Freddy Krueger, Hillary Clinton may just come back to terrorize our political discourse again—but not this year.

At the heart of this failure is an obsession with the “war on terrorism” that ignores larger forces shaping the world: the emergence of China, India, Russia and Europe; the spread of lethal weapons and dangerous diseases; uncertain supplies of energy, food and water; the persistence of poverty; ethnic animosities and state failures; a rapidly warming planet; the challenge to nation states from above and below.

Instead, Mr. Bush has turned a small number of radical groups that hate America into a 10-foot tall existential monster that dictates every move we make.

The problem with Biden’s analysis is that all those problems are being dealt with: the Bush Administration has been the most progressive administration in this century in terms of Africa policy. We were the first on the scene for the Indonesian tsunami. We’ve been in the lead on trying to get aid into Burma. The list could go on.

What Biden is trying to do is downplay the reality that terrorism is the central problem we face. Terrorism is one of the factors making our energy supply uncertain, it perpetuates poverty in places like Iraq, and it feeds of failed states. That doesn’t mean that terrorism is the sole problem, but it is the most significant, and a focus on terrorism is by necessity a focus on doing things like preventing failed states.

Al-Qaeda wasn’t turned into a monster by President Bush. They launched the first significant attack on continental America since 1812. They massively destabilized our economy and our way of life. And they would just love to do so again. The confluence of terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction is the greatest foreign policy threat we face—not the phantom menace of “a rapidly warming planet.”

And what would Sen. Biden do? The same policies that failed the Carter Administration:

Last week, John McCain was very clear. He ruled out talking to Iran. He said that Barack Obama was “naïve and inexperienced” for advocating engagement; “What is it he wants to talk about?” he asked.

Well, for a start, Iran’s nuclear program, its support for Shiite militias in Iraq, and its patronage of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

And exactly what leverage to we have to get Iran to change, Senator? Exactly what would talking achieve. Does anyone believe that Ahmadinejad or Khameini is going to agree to a deal in which Iran stops developing nuclear weapons? Are they going to stop spreading their influence because we ask nice?

That is the central, failed conceit of current Democratic foreign policy: it is hopelessly naïve. The Iranians cannot be negotiated out of supporting Hamas and Hizb’Allah. Why should they stop, unless we have a credible threat of force to back us up. Should a President Obama go to Tehran, does anyone really think that the mullahs would give a damn about what he said? They would have no reason to—they know damned well that he would never use force against them, so why would they bother to hold themselves to their own promises?

We tried this approach with North Korea. It didn’t work there, it’s still not working, and it won’t work with Tehran. At best, talking delays the inevitable. Teddy Roosevelt said we should talk softly and carry a big stick. The Democrats want us to go into Tehran, but they also want us to put away the stick.

Beyond bluster, how would Mr. McCain actually deal with these dangers? You either talk, you maintain the status quo, or you go to war. If Mr. McCain has ruled out talking, we’re stuck with an ineffectual policy or military strikes that could quickly spiral out of control.

Except talking doesn’t work. We may not have any choice but to go to war, but we’re not at that point yet. Sen. Biden misses another option: making the costs involved in challenging us too high to countenance.

We need a Machiavellian foreign policy, and the Democrats want us to act like Barney the Dinosaur and pretend that we’re all friends. You want to make Tehran not develop nuclear weapons? You make sure that the costs of doing so are high. We defeated the Soviet Union not through talks, but by making it very clear to the Soviets that if talking failed, we were perfectly willing to wipe them off the face of the globe.

Biden’s arguments on Iran don’t get any better:

It also requires a much more sophisticated understanding than Mr. Bush or Mr. McCain seem to possess that by publicly engaging Iran – including through direct talks – we can exploit cracks within the ruling elite, and between Iran’s rulers and its people, who are struggling economically and stifled politically.

Iran’s people need to know that their government, not the U.S., is choosing confrontation over cooperation. Our allies and partners need to know that the U.S. will go the extra diplomatic mile – if we do, they are much more likely to stand with us if diplomacy fails and force proves necessary.

The Bush-McCain saber rattling is the most self-defeating policy imaginable. It achieves nothing. But it forces Iranians who despise the regime to rally behind their leaders. And it spurs instability in the Middle East, which adds to the price of oil, with the proceeds going right from American wallets into Tehran’s pockets.

What is the alternative? It’s clear that talking is not going to help. The world community is not going to turn against Iran. Russia will not. China will not. Even Europe would balk.

A foreign policy based on meaningless words back with no credible threat of force is a foreign policy damned to fail—just as it did when Jimmy Carter did it. Under his watch, the Iranian regime was founded. We cannot afford such a disaster again.

We have to deal with Iran, but pretending that talk will solve anything is futile. Iran, like the rest of the Middle East, respects strength and laughs at the weak. The Democrats continue to advocate for a foreign policy of weakness in which a servile United States goes to our enemies and begs them to play nice.

Americans don’t beg, we lead from strength. That is how Reagan led this country to the end of the Cold War and how a President McCain will help lead this country to an end to the War on Islamic Terrorism.

“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” Obama said.

“That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen,” he added.

“Yes we can!” has now morphed into “that’s not going to happen.” So much for Obama’s positive message of “hope.” Apparently we can hope that Obama is merciful in dictating what we should drive, eat, and what temperature we can set our thermostats to.

Such a message is not going to win Obama any converts. Contrary to his defeatism, we can have a modern economy, a growing economy, and a quality standard of life without sacrificing the environment. It simply requires us to be proactive, creative, and not give into the Malthusian rhetoric of those who would set us back.

Berg compares Obama’s words to Jimmy Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech, and it’s an apt comparison. It displays a worldview that is in direct contradiction to Obama’s supposedly “hopeful” rhetoric. Instead of “hope” and “change” Obama’s true worldview seems to be that America must make itself low to be popular with others. That isn’t hope, that’s pessimism. That isn’t change, but a throwback the eras of Jimmy Carter’s fecklessness.

We need a 21st Century energy policy and a 21st Century farm policy. Sen. Obama would take us into the past with more barriers, taxes, subsidies and set-asides. A truly hopeful candidate would talk about the enormous potential of the years ahead—an age when our energy comes from nuclear, solar, wind, and other clean technologies. An age in which our cars are powered by cellulosic ethanol, biofuels, hydrogen or electricity produced by clean power. Obama is simply wrong: we can drive the cars we want, eat as well as we want, and set our thermostats to whatever we damn well please. The way we can do that is by advancing the state of technology and growing the economy. Slowing growth and rejecting new technologies is not the way forward. That should be real change we can believe in.