Bush / GOP

Dr. Robert Shapiro, Chair of NDN's Globalization Initiative, and Simon Rosenberg, NDN President, today released the following statement:

The current financial crisis was caused by the persistent failure of the current Administration and the Federal Reserve to appreciate how our financial markets have been rapidly changing or to take minimal care to ensure that those changes did not put the American economy at serious risk. The Treasury and the Fed now are using nearly $1 trillion of Americans' money to bail out financial institutions whose reckless mismanagement they tolerated or ignored. The Congress must put at least as much effort into containing the crisis at one of its critical origins, by helping people keep their homes so the housing market and the derivative instruments based on it can stabilize.

Before Congress leaves, it should enact legislation that allows struggling Americans to renegotiate their mortgages, starting with the huge portfolio the government now holds through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It should not be acceptable for our government to use taxpayers to bail out huge, mismanaged banks and insurance companies that speculated in mortgage-backed securities while allowing many of those same taxpayers to be tossed from the homes that backed up those securities. When Congress returns, it also should turn to the serious business of applying strict and appropriate transparency, capital and other regulatory standards to all significant financial institutions, including investment banks and hedge funds. And the politicians who hailed the hands-off attitude that enabled this crisis to fester and break out, and now blame greed instead of their own negligence, should be held accountable.

What a difference a few billion-dollar federal government bailouts can make.

U.S. Sen. John McCain is up with a new commercial in which he sounds like Wall Street's answer to Robin Hood.

Is this the same McCain that has spent the last quarter century in Washington deregulating the banking and insurance industries and decrying "government interference?"

Is this the same McCain that was instrumental in passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act designed to make the nation's financial institutions more competitive by tearing down firewalls built between banking, insurance and investment companies (firewalls designed to prevent exactly what's happening right now?)

An interesting note: Bill author U.S. Rep. Jim Leach, a Republican who is now retired, supports Obama. Another bill author, former U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm, is one of McCain's top economic advisers. 

A report in today's Washington Post by Michael Shear takes a look at McCain's conversion to economic populist. According to the article:

"I'm always for less regulation," he told the Wall Street Journal in March. He added: "I'd like to see a lot of the unnecessary government regulations eliminated."

Watch the new McCain ad below and see the difference for yourself:

You can feel it. The Obama campaign is firing on all cylinders, driving the news cycle now, hitting McCain hard, systematically taking Palin down, announcing an extraordinary fundraising month and expanding its grassroots base, making much better use of Biden and other surrogates, and finding their voice on the economy as never before. The McCain campaign is on the defensive, reeling from harsh criticism of McCain's character and working to contain the downside of Governor Palin. The new McCain ads, issue-based, without the wildness of earlier ads, speak to a chastened McCain camp. The national tracks have shown a 1-2 point shift in the race this week toward Senator Obama.

Today the race is still dead even. But Senator Obama has seized the initiative, and the momentum has shifted from Palin to the Democratic ticket. 

I still think the greatest challenge facing McCain is that he has no real plan for the future, and that running on a culture war and character simply isn't going to be enough in this election given all the very serious stuff going on. As Jake wrote yesterday, the two main arguments of the new McCain TV ad - that lower taxes will create jobs, and drilling will lower gas prices - are not true, and not promises America can bank on. 

The lack of seriousness of the McCain campaign - and the whole national Republican Party at this point - is simply astonishing. 

But at least, as Tina Fey says, the good Governor can see Russia from her porch. 

Ooops. Looks like U.S. Sen. John McCain's economic campaign surrogate Carly Fiorina didn't get this morning's talking points.

As you may recall, Fiorina used to head up Hewlett Packard. According to a report by Huffington Post's Sam Stein, Fiorina, appearing on a local St. Louis radio talk show, was asked if Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin had the experience to run a company such as Hewlett Packard.

"Do you think [Sarah Palin] has the experience to run a major company, like Hewlett Packard?" asked the host.

"No, I don't," responded Fiorina. "But you know what? That's not what she's running for."

Fiorina tried quickly to recover, but with Wall Street in shambles and the economy the central focus of the presidential campaign, for one of McCain's highest-profile economic surrogates to say that Palin -- who would be just one basis point away from the presidency -- couldn't run a major company, much less oversee the U.S. economy, could be a serious problem (kind of like when another McCain economic adviser, Phil Gramm, said America was a nation of "whiners.")

Listen to Fiorina's stumble here:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was in Golden, CO, today, where she weighed in on the Wall Street debacle.

Addressing the "guys and gals" in the crowd, Palin blamed the current (that would be the Republican) Administration and Wall Street for the economic crisis:

“Guys and gals, our regulatory system is outdated and needs a complete overhaul. Washington has ignored this. Washington has been asleep at the switch and ineffective and management on Wall Street has not run these institutions responsibly and has put companies and markets at risk,” Palin told the cheering crowd, “They place their own interests first instead of their employees and the shareholders who actually own these companies.”

Let's think about Palin's remarks for a moment: Washington has ignored this. Washington has been asleep at the switch.

If she means Washington "The Executive Branch," that would be the Republicans. If she means Washington "The Congress," that Congress includes her runningmate, U.S. Sen. John McCain, who I'm sure has had plenty of chances to fix many of the problems on Wall Street in his 26 years in Washington.

McCain and Palin may want to ignore President George W. Bush, and they've done a pretty good job so far. But they can't ignore eight years of Republican economic policies that have left most Americans worse off than they were in 2000. McCain chose Palin because she is a distraction, a sideshow. The real issue is that McCain's economic policies are exactly the same as or worse than the current President's policies. And if McCain is a winner, we'll all be losers.

To watch Palin's riveting analysis of our nation's economic woes, see below:

The further weakening of America's financial markets is tossing a major new issue into the Presidential race, one, that today, appears to make the job of the national GOP and their ticket much harder. U.S. Sen. Barack Obama opened up this new debate with this well-crafted statement:

"This morning we woke up to some very serious and troubling news from Wall Street.

"The situation with Lehman Brothers and other financial institutions is the latest in a wave of crises that are generating enormous uncertainty about the future of our financial markets. This turmoil is a major threat to our economy and its ability to create good-paying jobs and help working Americans pay their bills, save for their future, and make their mortgage payments.

"The challenges facing our financial system today are more evidence that too many folks in Washington and on Wall Street weren't minding the store. Eight years of policies that have shredded consumer protections, loosened oversight and regulation, and encouraged outsized bonuses to CEOs while ignoring middle-class Americans have brought us to the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression.

"I certainly don't fault Senator McCain for these problems, but I do fault the economic philosophy he subscribes to. It's a philosophy we've had for the last eight years - one that says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. It's a philosophy that says even common-sense regulations are unnecessary and unwise, and one that says we should just stick our heads in the sand and ignore economic problems until they spiral into crises.

"Well now, instead of prosperity trickling down, the pain has trickled up - from the struggles of hardworking Americans on Main Street to the largest firms of Wall Street.

"This country can't afford another four years of this failed philosophy. For years, I have consistently called for modernizing the rules of the road to suit a 21st century market - rules that would protect American investors and consumers. And I've called for policies that grow our economy and our middle-class together. That is the change I am calling for in this campaign, and that is the change I will bring as President,"

It will be interesting to see how the McCain campaign responds. Over the next seven weeks, its goal has to be to talk about anything other than the economic performance of this GOP era.

U.S. Sen. John McCain continues to claim the mantle of reformer despite having been a politician in DC for more than a quarter of a century. Like an old ship, he has quite a few barnicles clinging to his hull -- the lobbyist kind. Many of them have followed him over to his campaign, and it's no secret that the self-proclaimed maverick's campaign is being run by an army of lobbyists.

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama's campaign today launched a new television ad which asks Americans just what a McCain Administration might look like with all those high-dollar lobbyists in charge.

Check it out here:

During his first inaugural address in 1933, President Roosevelt said these now-famous words:

"So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

He was addressing a nation plunged into economic despair, a nation searching for someone to blame for these financial woes, a nation that was scared of massive technological shifts already underway, a nation open to demagogues.

Fast forwward to the Republican Convention in St. Paul in 2008. By any standard, it was a huge marketing success. Enormous flags on jumbotron screens. A homogenous audience that looks nothing like our country does today. What was the underlying theme of the Republican Convention? We don't have to change. We can turn back the clock and keep things just the way they were. When she spoke, Gov. Sarah Plain expertly played the crowd:

I grew up with those people. They're the ones who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food, and run our factories, and fight our wars. They love their country in good times and bad, and they're always proud of America.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich writes today about this fear of change in an excellent column. He notes the Republicans' use of peoples' fear of the demographic tidal wave headed our way that will leave whites the minority in the United States by 2042.

He also includes a paragraph on a favored Republican scapegoat: illegal immigrants.

And, last but hardly least, fear of illegal immigrants who do the low-paying jobs that Americans don’t want to do and of legal immigrants who do the high-paying jobs that poorly educated Americans are not qualified to do. No less revealing than Palin’s convention invocation of Pegler was the pointed omission of any mention of immigration, once the hottest Republican issue, by either her or McCain. Saying the word would have cued an eruption of immigrant-bashing ugliness, Pegler-style, before a national television audience. That wouldn’t play in the swing states of Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, where Obama already has a more than 2-to-1 lead among Hispanic voters. (Bush captured roughly 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004.)

In his paragraph on illegal immigrants, Rich links to a USA TODAY report about new polls NDN released last week. The polls, conducted by long-time NDN collaborator and pollster Sergio Bendixen, show overwhelming support for comprehensive immigration reform in four key battleground states: Florida, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. The polls also show that U.S. Sen. Barack Obama holds a significant lead over U.S. Sen. John McCain among Hispanics in these states.

To learn more about why these four states matter so much in the new politics of the 21st century, read our report from earlier this year, Hispanics Rising II.

It's clear that the southwest and states with heavy Hispanic populations are the new battleground states -- and are part of the change that many people fear.

Palin and her fellow Republicans may play upon this fear of change, but the McCain campaign is no dummy.

Where was Palin campaigning yesterday? Carson City, Nevada.

As the Congress moves closer to bipartisan energy legislation, John McCain is nowhere to be found. Instead his campaign – on the one issue that was supposed to separate him from Bush – is clinging to the old energy paradigm. It's hard to believe, but John McCain is now more out of touch than most of the Republican members of the U.S. Senate.

Bipartisan energy legislation, discussed today at the U.S. Senate’s energy summit, has gained momentum through the work of the "Gang of 10/16/22," and now looks to be one of three proposals that will come up in the Senate next week. (The House is also at work on bipartisan legislation.)

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama has said he is willing to accept a compromise on drilling to advance energy legislation that includes provisions for the expansion of renewable energy and efficiency. McCain, meanwhile, is stuck in a dogmatic anti-tax fuzz. Left behind by much of his party, McCain unwilling to compromise, show up to vote, or take any sort of stand to help make moves on energy.

Meanwhile, the bottom half of the McCain ticket has pledged to try to move him toward drilling in ANWR, which shouldn’t be hard since he only recently moved away from an opposition to drilling in the OCS to a wholehearted, singular support of it, and since he looks to be moving away from supporting Cap and Trade climate legislation.

This move away from Cap and Trade isn’t a surprise, as coming up with a serious energy policy doesn’t seem to be a goal of his ticket. Since his VP candidate knows more about energy than just about anyone else, and doesn’t believe climate change is man made – despite her absurd claims on television last night that she had never said that – John McCain owes American voters a big clarification as to where he stands on energy.

It looks like he may get the chance next week. Will he step up to plate and vote, or will his old, no show ways get left in the dust by Democrats and Republicans alike? Next week, when John McCain finds himself looking to the right on energy and only seeing James "Global Warming is a hoax" Inhofe, he’ll find himself running on empty. (Unless Jackson Browne sues him again.)

U.S. Sen. John McCain looked like he'd rather be just about anywhere else on the planet today but on the set of ABC's popular show, "The View," being skewered by hosts Joy Behar and  Barbara Walters and slyly maneuvered by Whoopi Goldberg into denying that he wanted to reinstate slavery.

McCain looked incredibly out of place - formal, stiff and increasingly testy -- as he perched uncomfortably on the arrangement of golden-yellow couches as the interview went on. He was asked about whether he would work to overturn Roe v. Wade (yes, he would, thank you very much, and he was booed by the studio audience).  He was asked why he lied in his campaign commercials and became particularly agitated. Whoopi asked him if his strict interpretation of the Constitution meant she has to run for it if he made it to the White House.

Check out Barbara Walters' body language. She is trying to move as far away as she can from him and she is looking at McCain with clear disdain as she pins him down again and again.

I bet McCain needed a drink after this one.