Anyone in DC tomorrow who likes (or hates) this blog should swing by The Fund for American Studies (1706 New Hampshire Avenue NW) for an AFF Roundtable featuring Doublethink alum James Poulos and current Conventional Follyer David Donadio among other interesting, garrulous, friendly people. We’ll be debating what foreign policy on the Right means after this momentous election, and how we should be thinking about the way forward in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Drinks are at 6:30, panel begins at 7pm. If all goes reasonably well, we’ll continue the debate in some bar around Dupont afterwards. If things go catastrophically awry, we’ll just go to a bar and drink in silence. Either way, you don’t want to miss this.

Roundtables are free for AFF members and $5 for non-members. If you intend to come, please try to RSVP to cindy@americasfuture.org.

See you there!

CNN reports:

Randy Scheunemann, a senior foreign policy adviser to John McCain, was fired from the Arizona senator’s campaign last week for what one aide called “trashing” the campaign staff, three senior McCain advisers tell CNN.

One of the aides tells CNN that campaign manager Rick Davis fired Scheunemann after determining that he had been in direct contact with journalists spreading “disinformation” about campaign aides, including Nicolle Wallace and other officials.

“He was positioning himself with Palin at the expense of John McCain’s campaign message,” said one of the aides.

Not that it would’ve mattered much in this atmosphere of economic uncertainty—and it certainly wouldn’t've mattered to more than a handful of DC people even in boom times—but I do wish John McCain had ditched this belligerent little man earlier during his campaign.

I saw Randy Scheunemann speak at two events and came away profoundly unimpressed each time. The man’s a shrill ideologue who, given his privileged position and long history of working with McCain, was probably responsible for the most unpalatable foreign policy positions articulated by the Republican side.

Here’s to hoping his career isn’t resurrected by a resurgent Palin in 2012.

Greg Pollowitz at the Corner:

Bill Clinton Helps Out…
By letting America know that Senator Obama had no clue what to do when the financial crisis hit. At 3AM, how many people will a President Obama have time to chat with?

“You know what he did?” Clinton said, heralding Obama’s reaction to the financial crisis. “First he took a little heat for not saying much. I knew what he was doing. He talked to his advisers – he talked to my economic advisers, he called Hillary. He called me. He called Warren Buffet. He called all those people, you know why? Because he knew it was complicated and before he said anything he wanted to understand.”

I have to say I’m with Bill on this one. I’m really sick of hip-shooting yahoos “making decisions” in places of power at times of crisis. Judging by how well John McCain’s campaign suspension stunt went over, I’d say that many people would agree with me.

Fascinating stuff coming out of Alan Greenspan’s testimony today, difficult stuff for dyed-in-the-wool libertarians to countenance, I’d imagine. Snippets from the WSJ story:

“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief,” according to Mr. Greenspan.

…

But when Mr. Waxman pressed “were you wrong” about the benefits of deregulation, Mr. Greenspan responded, “partially.” The “flaw” in the assumptions he had over four decades, Mr. Greenspan said, was that lending institutions themselves were best able to protect the interest of their shareholders.

Thus what looked like a solid edifice to his thinking broke down, Mr. Greenspan said.

I look forward to seeing how more orthodox libertarians around the web parse his remarks. More thoughts on this in the coming days from me as well, time permitting.

Marc Ambinder reports that Republican donors are furious with the McCain campaign having spent more than $150,000 on Palin’s wardrobe and makeup since she was chosen:

The Democrats are going to have a lot more fun with this than is prudent, but the heat for this story will come from Republicans who cannot understand how their party would do something this stupid … particularly (and, it must be said, viewed retroactively) during the collapse of the financial system and the probable beginning of a recession.

Come on, people, it was clearly the campaign’s way of providing fiscal stimulus to the economy. We are all Keynesians now!

This calls for some serious spin.

Just riffing on my previous Apple love post: did you know that Apple doesn’t use focus groups to develop its products? Here’s a great quote from Steve Jobs in Businessweek, May 25, 1998:

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

Here’s another one from March 2008 in Fortune:

“So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what’s the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me “A faster horse.” ‘ ”

…

“We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products.

[quotes from this forum thread on ArsTechnica]

Apple’s example goes to the heart of what’s so appealing about “enlightened despotism” as a means of social organization: most people who’ve used an Apple machine after using Windows can testify that it’s a superior experience, damning testimony against the democratically-inspired design-by-committee method so popular at Microsoft.

The challenge, of course, comes in succession—not everyone is a Steve Jobs or a Lee Kuan Yew, nor can we expect many such visionary individuals to be born in our world in one lifetime. Cue Winston Churchill on democracy…

I love Apple Computers because they’re quite possibly the most elitist company in existence. Here’s a snippet from their conference call today:

Jobs and other Apple execs addressed questions related to Apple’s entry into the netbook and basement-priced PC categories by saying Apple simply doesn’t sell to certain customers. “We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk,” Jobs said. “It’s just not in our DNA. That’s not what we do.”

If you can’t spend the extra money to buy Apple, go ahead and buy something else. Go on, shoo! We don’t want your business.

Goaded in no small part by my blog post, no doubt, Palin is doing an interview with CNN tonight and NBC tomorrow.

Via Hitchens, I learn that John McCain’s best buddy Lindsey Graham said this about Governor Palin sitting down to interviews with the press:

We’re asking the American people to pick the next president and vice president, and we do not expect the American people to do so—’Trust me’—blindly. She will have to do what’s expected of people in this business. … In countries where that does not happen, I do not want to live.

Can the McCain campaign keep Palin under wraps through the elections? It seems like they’ve got no incentive not to, given how any sort of flub, even a minor one, would drown his sinking campaign once and for all. I’d imagine Palin herself is keenly aware of her own limitations after the Gibson and Couric interviews and is in no rush to ruin her own chances in 2012 should McCain lose in two weeks.

Nevertheless, quotes like the above suggest that should McCain lose, the Palin choice and its consequences will have done a fair bit of harm to the reputations of many of the good Senator’s friends and allies. I imagine the candid conversations will not be pretty.

Dow’s down a whole lot today. Is the end in sight? Probably not.

Financial sector troubles have started to affect consumption decisions on the part of individuals, with consumer purchases down 1.2% in September. Credit getting tight? No flat screen TV this year.

Why are chances good that the end is nowhere near in sight? Have a look at this awesome graph I found on the internets:

You see where that line starts going crazy? That’s around 1996, when Greenspan made his famous “irrational exuberance” remark. (h/t Yves Smith).

In closing, let me introduce you to another awesome economics term: overshooting.

Fasten your seatbelts, my friends. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

A co-worker said to me a few weeks back, “If it’s close, it’ll be McCain. If it’s not, it’ll be Obama.” It’s sure starting to look like he was very right.

Here’s an astounded letter from a long-time Republican consultant, published by Ben Smith over at Politico. He’d just shown an independent focus group a tailored not-yet-aired ad which went after Obama very hard. Here’s the reaction:

Reagan Dems and Independents. Call them blue-collar plus. Slightly more Target than Walmart.

Yes, the spot worked. Yes, they believed the charges against Obama. Yes, they actually think he’s too liberal, consorts with bad people and WON’T BE A GOOD PRESIDENT…but they STILL don’t give a f***. They said right out, “He won’t do anything better than McCain” but they’re STILL voting for Obama.

The two most unreal moments of my professional life of watching focus groups:

54 year-old white male, voted Kerry ‘04, Bush ‘00, Dole ‘96, hunter, NASCAR fan…hard for Obama said: “I’m gonna hate him the minute I vote for him. He’s gonna be a bad president. But I won’t ever vote for another god-damn Republican. I want the government to take over all of Wall Street and bankers and the car companies and Wal-Mart run this county like we used to when Reagan was President.”

The next was a woman, late 50s, Democrat but strongly pro-life. Loved B. and H. Clinton, loved Bush in 2000. “Well, I don’t know much about this terrorist group Barack used to be in with that Weather guy but I’m sick of paying for health insurance at work and that’s why I’m supporting Barack.”

I felt like I was taking crazy pills. I sat on the other side of the glass and realized…this really is the Apocalypse. The Seventh Seal is broken and its time for eight years of pure, delicious crazy….

The populace sounds pissed off. If Obama wins, I collect $100 and a steak dinner from various bets I’ve placed with friends. Maybe it’s time to start betting on margins of victory…

Good on McCain, tamping down the misinformed excesses of the base base.

Ever listen to the Russians justify their incursion into Georgia on the grounds of human rights? Being somewhat familiar with Russians and their prejudices, it’s rung a bit hollow to me.

Over at Doublethink Online, Doug Robertson’s taken two Russian works, Lermontov’s A Hero Of Our Time, and the Soviet-era film Kidnapping Caucasian Style, and in his inimitable style has shown the complicated yet ultimately dismissive attitude Russians have for the roguish people that live to their south.

A snippet from the section on Lermontov to whet your appetite:

To their immediate credit, the Ossetes are always presented as eager to be taken into service: the traveler seemingly can hardly mark two versts in succession without a crowd of them descending upon him like so many would-be window-squeegee-ers upon a twenty-first century inner-city motorist. But no sooner have they been hired than they transform themselves into veritable living engines of inertia, apportioning the work at hand as diffusively as possible and retarding its progress by means of what one cannot help terming a strategy of deliberate counterproductivity: “There was nothing else for it,” writes the narrator, “so I hired six bullocks and a few Ossetes. One of them heaved my portmanteau on to his shoulders and the others helped the bullocks along, doing little more than just shouting.”

Immediately thereafter he catches sight of a Russian army officer (the aforementioned Maxim Maximych) who, to his astonishment, is making equally speedy progress with heavier luggage, fewer bullocks, and no Ossetian help whatsoever. The officer’s explanation for the discrepancy, for all of its telegraphic syntax, is as transparent to interpretation as it is unsparing: “Fearful rogues, these Asiatics [!] are. Do you really think they’re doing any good with all that shouting? God alone knows what it’s all about! But the oxen understand them. You hitch up twenty bullocks if you like, but they won’t budge an inch when they shout at them in that language of theirs. Dreadful scoundrels they are! But what can you do to them? They like to fleece travelers…”.

Read the whole thing. It’s worth your time.

I’ve argued with my more staunchly libertarian friends, both online and off, about the financial crisis and what can/should be done about it. Now I ask them: Would this plan of Greg Mankiw’s be acceptable to you?

Whenever any financial institution attracts new private capital in an arms-length transaction, it can access an equal amount of public capital. The taxpayer would get the same terms as the private investor. The only difference is that government’s shares would be nonvoting until the government sold the shares at a later date.

This plan would solve the three problems. The private sector rather than the government would weed out the zombie firms. The private sector rather than the government would set the price. And the private sector rather than the government would exercise corporate control.

Sounds really good to me.

In response to a cracking good post by James Poulos over at Culture11, Matt Frost inadvertently hits upon something I’ve been working over in my head ever since Grand New Party came out: that conservatism and capitalism are headed for a long and painful divorce.

James, writing about a lecture by Harvey Mansfield the other day, presents the question for conservatism as a choice between going backwards and going slowly. This prompts Frost to muse thusly:

But one quote that springs to mind comes from, of all people, tedious socialist Karl Polanyi, who, despite his leftist bona fides, exhibits the wistful conservatism typical of the intellectual diaspora of Austria-Hungary.

He goes on to approvingly cite a passage from Polanyi’s essential The Great Transformation which praises the cautious approach the Tudors and Stuarts took towards the privatization of land in England.

Contra Mr. Frost, there’s really no contradiction in a skeptic of capitalism praising conservative governance, because there’s absolutely nothing conservative about capitalism. The Enclosure Acts, which Polanyi tells us the Stuarts and Tudors so wisely opposed, were nothing less than the groundwork for the establishment of private property. Without the ability to own land for private use, the profit motive could never successfully have taken hold and the Industrial Revolution would not have happened. The downside, as Polanyi points out, is that the Enclosure Acts absolutely ravaged the English countryside, destroying traditional rural life and forcing countless thousands into increasingly overcrowded cities.

Now as even “tedious socialist” Polanyi notes, the end result is that we’re all a whole lot better off due to the innovations of capitalism. The average member of the working class in the United States today enjoys more comforts than Pharaohs in Egypt could hope for. But we should never forget that capitalism is a revolutionary force that changes—and often violently destroys—anything that stands in its way.

The fact that conservatives in the United States are also free marketeers is a historical aberration. Though Grand New Party’s thought-provoking prescriptions attempt to harness market forces to help the working class, I don’t doubt that if push came to shove, Ross Douthat would favor curtailing capitalism in order to conserve aspects of society he thinks are vital. (I can’t guess what Reihan would say, as his writings are often so eclectic that they frustrate easy summary.)

It’s a fissure that will only continue to grow in the Republican Party as the irreconcilability of capitalism with traditionalism inevitably works itself out.

I don’t chime in too much when it comes to domestic politics and policy because I’m largely out of my depth. I’m a foreign policy guy by inclination, and I don’t have the iron constitution required to wade through the slimy panderings of political candidates in order to arrive at their ‘true’ position on taxation, health care, entitlement reform, etc. I also maintain that the president has maximum leeway to do as he pleases in foreign policy, so that’s the main criterion he should be judged on.

That said, with what has been happening during the last three weeks on Wall Street, I don’t think I’ve ever cared less whether Obama or McCain would commit troops to solve a humanitarian crisis in Congo. Or whether the candidates think Russia is an Evil Empire. Or whether they’d send troops to the Middle East to fight Iran if Israel was attacked. Since neither candidate was able to go beyond the standard populist bromides when talking about the financial crisis, hearing them talk about what they would do internationally sounded incredibly silly and irrelevant.

EDIT: I should note that I’m coming down with a cold and am in a foul mood. Reading around the web, it doesn’t seem that people were as down on the debate as I was.

Edited: Not work safe.

I’ve always found it apt when the everyman supporters of a political movement are called “the base”. As a coastal elitist snob, I often heap scorn on the base elements of our society which also happen to be the bases of both parties—indeed, the bases of all successful parties in a democracy.

For a democracy to properly function, however, the base base must not be agitated with populism and demagoguery. If it is, ugliness ensues and democracy is threatened. Witness this WaPo report:

Worse, Palin’s routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”

Sow the seeds of discord, reap the whirlwind. Something like that.

Is Charles Krauthammer calling it for Obama? Sure sounds like it:

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said of Franklin Roosevelt that he had a “second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament.” Obama has shown that he is a man of limited experience, questionable convictions, deeply troubling associations (Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Tony Rezko) and an alarming lack of self-definition — do you really know who he is and what he believes? Nonetheless, he’s got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president.

Emphasis mine. Call me an elitist all you want, but that’s always been Obama’s appeal to me, especially when contrasted with the folksy “average Joe” demeanor of George W. Bush. I don’t ever want to feel like I can drink a beer with the President of the United States. Ever.

With the bailout compromise bill going down in flames in the House, I just want to highlight two very sensible paragraphs written by Jim Manzi over at The American Scene just before the vote happened:

It seems to me that biggest cost of this proposal is not the direct expenditure. The government would commit to up to $700BB to buy and then re-sell some assets. How much they would recoup is unclear, but history suggests that it is far from impossible that this would be close to break-even. How is it possible that the Treasury could avoid paying more than they are worth if the bail-out is to help the banks at all? Because the fact of the Treasury being available to buy them changes their market value.

Before we get too excited about this seeming magic, however, we should remember – as I went into in greater detail a prior post – that the ideological costs of this are likely to be extremely heavy over time. This is a terrible precedent on many levels. Further, we can’t be sure that there really would be a cataclysm without the bail-out, nor can we be sure that this will be enough to avoid one if it’s coming. We are making a bet to lower the odds of a bad outcome. It’s just that the severity of a Great Depression is sufficiently bad that it is a worthwhile bet to make. But we will pay dearly for it for many years. In this way, the bail-out should be seen as one move in the course of a long and unpredictable campaign.

Emphasis mine. He concludes, “But now it’s time to swallow hard and vote for the bill.”

Very interesting to see how the aftermath of this afternoon will play out. It sure looks like the House GOP acted just as I feared they would.

UPDATE: Megan McArdle:

I am grimly reminded of H.L. Mencken’s famous observation that Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.