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Robert Samuelson on Paulson’s “confidence” game.
It’s doubtful that Princeton University economist Ben Bernanke and former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson imagined what awaited them when they took charge of the Fed and the Treasury, respectively, in 2006. Since then, they have put their agencies on a wartime footing, trying to avert the financial equivalent of an army’s collapse. As in war, there have been repeated surprises. As in war, the responses have involved much improvisation — for instance, the $85 billion rescue of American International Group. But last week their hastily built defenses seemed to be crumbling, so Paulson proposed a radical solution of having the government buy vast amounts of distressed debt to shore up the financial system.
It’s all about confidence, stupid. Every financial system depends on trust. People have to believe that the institutions they deal with will perform as expected. We are in a crisis because financial managers — the people who run banks, investment banks, hedge funds — have lost that trust. Banks recoil from lending to each other; investors retreat. The ultimate horror is when everyone wants to sell and no one wants to buy. Paulson’s plan aims to avoid that calamity. …
David Harsanyi reacts to Biden’s claim it’s patriotic to pay taxes.
The Boston Tea Party be damned. This week, Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden unleashed the most absurd remark of his illustrious career, claiming that taxes were “patriotic.”
Biden claims that wealthier Americans should pay more in taxes because, “It’s time to be patriotic . . . time to jump in, time to be part of the deal, time to help get America out of the rut.”
Oh, the injustice of American society!
When exactly did taxation transform into a form of charity? Biden, it seems, has a difficult time differentiating between coercion and generosity. The distinction is simple: When one fails at altruism, he is a louse; when one fails to pay taxes, he ends up in the slammer.
But anyone can “jump in” at any time. Biden and his wife, who would be considered wealthy under an Obama/Biden tax plan, for instance, gave an average of $369 a year to charity during the past decade. So you can see that by “help,” Biden means assistance with your money. …
Columnist for Toronto Globe and Mail writes on the incredible shrinking Obama.
How’s Barack Obama’s narrative going?
Journalists used to tell stories, now they plumb narratives. Narrative is a pretentious borrowing from the abstraction-clotted world of academic criticism, where texts are interrogated, authors are dead and high-toned fatuousness is king. I’ll see your postmodern and raise you a meta.
Mr. Obama’s campaign, however, has renewed narrative’s trendy fizz. It is the very Perrier water (or is it San Pellegrino now?) of the better campaign reportage. Take no hike up Pundit Mountain without it. From the moment, the Obama surge took forceful shape, everyone – reporters, the scholars of blogland, the partisan howler monkeys of cable-news cage matches – has chattered on about Mr. Obama’s narrative.
Trouble is, most of the story of the campaign isn’t so much coming from the candidate himself as it is created by all those who, most in worshipful terms, have talked, written and reported on or about him. The Obama campaign is one great text generator, the grand fable of his fans.
In one sense, this is not surprising. He has a quicksilver quality. Even after two autobiographies, Mr. Obama remains something of a floating, uncrowded presence. His story (and he is so impressively self-aware as to have made the most acute comment on it) is temptingly open-ended, very much a page to be written on. He himself has written, most memorably: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” …
Noemie Emery has a lot of fun calculating the Palin effect.
Now that the dust is beginning to settle from the whirlwind descent of Hurricane Sarah, it may be time to stand back a little and assess in perspective what the moose-hunting beauty from Wasilla, Alaska, has wrought. Things will change between now and November, but she has already had a sizeable impact, and four major themes do stand out:
1. Call off the funeral. Three weeks ago, the wisdom was that the conservative movement was over and done with. It had burned itself out, taking the Republican party down with it, and setting the stage for the biggest explosion of liberal governance since perhaps the New Deal. Ever since November 2006, when the roof quite deservedly fell in on the Republican Congress, liberals have declared that the Reagan Era–first pronounced dead in 1982, then in 1986, then in 1988, then in 1992, then again in 1998-2000, and of course dead for good in 2006–was at long last finally going to receive the burial it deserved. …
Yesterday we had Larry Sabato on the state of the race. Today Jay Cost from Real Clear Politics takes a turn.
There’s been a lot of talk about this dynamic race – “game changers” and “moments” and things of that nature. Regular readers of mine know that I don’t subscribe to the view of politics inherent to that kind of analysis.
As an alternative to discussing Fannie, Freddie, lipstick on pigs, hacked emails, and patriotic 1040 filers – I thought I would put some simple numbers on the board to give us a sense of exactly what has changed since June 3rd.
I’ve broken the national polling into two sorting categories. First, we sort by pollster. We group the Gallup polls together, then the Rasmussen polls, then the remaining polls.
Second, we sort by date. We group the polls for June, then for July, then for August prior to the conventions, then for today. …
John Fund points out one of the reasons we’ll have to hold our noses.
Peter Robinson looks for Barack’s sense of humor.
Work your way down a checklist of the attributes a presidential candidate needs and you’ll see that Barack Obama possesses all but one.
Is he intelligent? Obviously. A quick study, capable of ingesting and then disgorging immense quantities of boring information about public policy? That’s how he got elected president of the Harvard Law Review. Good with words? Very. Just read his first book. (His second, a campaign book, was written not to be read but to be placed on coffee tables.) Determined? Resilient? He prevailed in a contest with Hillary Clinton that proved more grueling than the 12 labors of Hercules.
What Barack Obama lacks is simple–and a lot more important than it might seem: a sense of humor. …
James Taranto posts on the media’s cavalier attitude towards the hackers who broke into Sarah Palin’s computer.