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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Carragher who wrote (19182)	12/9/2003 9:17:43 AM
From: gamesmistress	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793721

It didn't break my heart when he got fired from the GLobe for plagiarism..took them long enough, and he landed on his feet. Why anyone would still want to read him, I dunno, but he seems to remain a draw. I think a new generation of columnists will emerge from the blogs, not traditional media, since the papers/TV shows are sticking like glue to the Boomer personalities that have been around for 25-30 years.

To: John Carragher who wrote (19182)	12/9/2003 10:04:51 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793721

Here is David Frum's take on Gore/Dean. NRO DEC. 9, 2003: REPLAY Add one more name to the list of those who believe that Howard Dean will prove a cataclysmic disaster for the Democratic party: Al Gore. Why else would Gore have endorsed him? Think about it. Does Gore still wish to be president? Pretty clearly, he does: Otherwise he would have found himself a real job and moved to LA, rather than dabbling in business while maintaining a theoretical domicile in Carthage, Tennessee. But how to gain the presidency? Gore was right to decide against running in 2004. The problem for him was not just that incumbents are hard to beat, but that his party has gone nuts. Had Gore run, much of the rage now directed at George W. Bush for defeating the Dems in 2000 and 2002 would have directed itself instead at Al Gore for losing an eminently winnable race. Gore would have had to reply endlessly to questions about his campaigning in 2000, about his handling of the Florida recount, about his ultimate concession, about his silence on the Bush tax cut, etc. etc. etc. By 2008, those passions will have drained away. Of course, should another Democrat win in 2004, there will be no contest in 2008 for Gore to join. So Gore has to wish for defeat this year. And not for mere defeat, but for catastrophic defeat. A Democratic wipeout in 2004 would make Gore’s performance in 2000 – 51 million votes, 266 electoral votes – look retrospectively much more impressive. That will be especially true when the Democrats wake up to the fact that Dean runs badly with working-class whites and African-Americans. (James Taranto yesterday cited this wonderful line from the Chicago Tribune: “The pre-printed signs ‘African-Americans for Dean’ were held by white supporters.” Meanwhile, Ryan Lizza is astutely observing in this week’s New Republic that Dean and Kerry are campaigning in Iowa’s richest towns, while Gephardt and Edwards seek their votes in the poorest ones. Those who argue that Dean will be a more formidable candidate than expected point to his Vermont record as a fiscal moderate and to the comparative modesty of his health-insurance plan, which is way less generous than that offered by the other major Democratic candidates. But Dean’s combination of weakness in foreign policy, ultra-permissiveness in social policy, and stinginess in fiscal policy isn’t “centrism”: It’s the politics of the dinner parties of Brentwood and East Hampton, of people who read Vanity Fair and don't need an SUV because their grocer delivers. Look at this election from the point of view of a swing voter: say the assistant manager of an Ace hardware in suburban Nashville. He’s patriotic in foreign affairs, moderate to conservative on social issues – but worried about how he’s going to pay his mother’s nursing home bills. What is Dean offering him? Nothing but contempt. I’ll bet a box of Canadian doughnuts that if Dean is the Democratic nominee, Bush will win Illinois, Michigan, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania – all states that Gore carried in 2000. I would not be entirely surprised to see Bush take California too. It’s already easy to predict the Democratic party’s after-action reports on 2004: “We got pushed way too far to the extremes, especially on national security issues, by a candidate who lacked national experience and was foisted on us by a bunch of white college kids who didn’t know anything and didn’t care anything about the economic problems of our voting base.” Sometime after November 2004, a candidate who hails from the border South, served in Vietnam, appeals to black voters, accumulated a long record on national security issues, held the country’s second-highest office, was associated with the longest economic expansion in the country’s history, and proved himself a popular vote-getter in three national elections will begin to look good to his fellow-Democrats, never mind the Florida recount. So Gore needs to speed his party toward the cataclysm – and if he can win new friends on the party’s left and look like a good sport while greasing the skids, all the better. It’s very striking that the party’s two frontrunners for 2008, Gore and Hillary Clinton, are both borrowing pages from the old Richard Nixon playbook. Hillary is reinventing herself just as the “new Nixon” did in 1968; Gore meanwhile is following exactly the same plan for 2004 that Nixon adopted in 1964, when he made sympathetic noises toward Goldwater while complacently watching his successor lead his party to the worst debacle in its post-Depression history. 2004 may not be quite as one-sided an election as 1964 or even 1972, unless of course Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein is captured or shown to have been killed before November. But even without a spectacular further victory in the war on terror, 2004 is shaping up to look a lot like 1988, when another Northeastern near-pacifist won only nine states, all of the except West Virginia in the band of Yankee settlement across the top of the country. So: well played Al. We’ll see you again. nationalreview.com

To: John Carragher who wrote (19182)	12/9/2003 10:57:22 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793721

Greenspan's Finest Hour? Newsweek Robert Samulson It may ultimately be said of Alan Greenspan that he enjoyed his finest hour just when the public admired him least. Let's recall that only a few months ago, the shaky economic outlook inspired fears of deflation--a general decline in prices caused by too much supply (of unemployed workers, unused fiber optics and lots more) chasing too little demand. Now the U.S. economy is leading a global recovery. Greenspan and the Federal Reserve deserve much, though not all, of the credit for this turnaround. OF COURSE, THEY aren't getting it. Greenspan is no longer the hero of the 1990s, when he was celebrated for engineering the longest boom in American history. Just the opposite. The bursting of the stock-market bubble spawned resentment that he had contributed to runaway speculation. Despite its recovery, the market has lost roughly $5 trillion (30 percent) since its March 2000 peak, and despite economic revival, the 8.7 million unemployed workers in November was still 3.2 million higher than in April 2000. Griping is understandable--and short-sighted. By creating the Fed in 1913, Congress aimed to avoid banking crises. In an era before government deposit insurance, one bank's loan losses could trigger runs on other banks. There was the related problem of seasonal surges in loan demands, tied to farmers' needs to finance their crops. These surges could lead to higher interest rates, loan defaults and panics. The Fed was supposed to create an "elastic" currency that would stabilize the economy. It would supply funds to solvent banks threatened by panics, as well as accommodating--with more money--sharp jumps in credit demands. Unfortunately, the Fed's history is mainly defined by two colossal blunders, says economist Allan Meltzer, author of "A History of the Federal Reserve." The first was the Great Depression of the 1930s, when it failed to provide sufficient money to prevent a series of banking panics that devastated the economy. In 1933, the unemployment rate averaged 25 percent. The Fed erred, says Meltzer, because it followed a theory (named "real bills") that called for it to create money only in response to higher loan demand; because loan demand had collapsed, the Fed was too passive. The second blunder was the recent Great Inflation, when the Fed flooded the economy with too much money. From 1961 to 1980, inflation jumped from 1 percent to 13.5 percent. The Fed embraced mistaken Keynesian doctrines that the aggressive easing of credit could cut unemployment. What Greenspan & Co. may have done is to avoid a third big blunder. So much was beginning to go wrong with the economy at the end of 2000--and the rest of the world was so dependent on the American economy--that a timid reaction from the Fed might have been fatal. It might have further weakened both spending and spirits. But the Fed responded forcefully. It cut interest rates 11 times in 2001 and once again in 2002 and 2003. The Fed funds rate (on overnight loans between banks) went from 6.5 percent in late 2000 to its present 1 percent, the lowest since 1958. None of this was preordained. The European Central Bank was more cautious. It cut rates much less and more slowly than the Fed. Greenspan & Co. seemed to be operating mostly by a seat-of-the-pants judgment that: (a) inflation wasn't a present danger and (b) repairing the damage from the bubble economy required a long period of easy credit. Whatever the rationale, the Fed's low short-term interest rates influenced the decline of rates on mortgages and bonds, which in turn rescued the economy. Home building, home sales and housing prices--all sensitive to mortgage rates--jolted upward. Homeowners refinanced mortgages at lower rates and (often) higher amounts. Through new loans or home sales, Americans raised $421 billion of cash in 2001, $599 billion in 2002 and $716 billion in the first half of 2003 (at an annual rate), estimates Mark Zandi of Economy.com. The extra cash bolstered consumer spending. Meanwhile, low rates also reduced corporate debt burdens and helped developing countries borrow more easily. Some rate declines have been stunning. At their peak in 2002, emerging-market bonds were about 9 percentage points higher than U.S. Treasuries; now they're only about 4 points higher. This story requires two caveats. First, the economy's revival also has other causes: big tax cuts, innate American optimism, the ability of U.S. companies to cut costs and improve profits. And second, the revival still faces many threats: the fading effects of tax cuts and lower interest rates (the mortgage-refinancing boom), cautiousness in corporate America, high levels of consumer debt and weak economies in Europe, Japan and Latin America. The avoidance of calamity may not seem like a big deal, but it is. The Fed can never deliver the economy into paradise but can, through well-intentioned mistakes, push it into purgatory. The hazards of the postbubble economy were sufficiently unfamiliar to risk a major miscalculation that might have severely damaged the U.S. and global economies. If Greenspan has prevented that, people may not notice now--but history will. msnbc.com