Senator John McCain’s unprecedented war against the New York Times continues to amaze.

There are really two separate stories here: one, the ties of Rick Davis’ former firm to Fannie and Freddie Mac and a second one about the New York Times’ ideological war against all enemies of Obama.

Part I

Politico gets it exactly right with the headline: “McCain camp attacks Times, doesn’t deny report.” The McCain statement hotly denies Davis’ involvement (which no one has alleged) and does not address whether his former outfit was doing business with the Fannie and Freddie as recently as last month.

Of course, the New York Times is trying to have it both ways. While their story might be technically correct (no one has addressed the direct allegations), it is essentially a non-story meant to create a moral equivalency. Let me explain both parts.

Non-story: Who cares what a former employer does? The minute you leave, your responsibility ends–whether is by resignation or leave of absence. And Davis never even worked on the account when he did work there. At best, this is guilt by association–what the Left hates Sen. McCarthy for.  There is no news story here. So why write the “story”?

“Moral equivalency.” Obama is tied to Fannie and Freddie seven ways to Sunday: He took more campaign contributions from them than any other senator, save one. He hired Fannie’s former chief executive to run his vice-presidential search team. And, despite the denials, appears to have hired a second former Fannie chief executive to advise him on “housing policy.” Meanwhile, McCain loudly demanded reform for years while the fashionable friends of Fannie (and Obama) looked on, unmoved.  These facts, presented in tv spots, would tar Obama with the greatest economic disaster of the past decade. So the search was on. Somehow tie someone connected to McCain to Fannie and, then say, “well both parties did it…”

If one continues to insist that McCain was long the lonely voice for reform and Obama is up to his eyeballs with Fannie’s corruption, you will get written off as a partisan hack.

So far the strategy seems to be working.

McCain would be better off saying “So what? When my former employer, the U.S. Navy, makes a mistake, everyone knows it would be unfair to blame me. Why do you hold my campaign manager to a different standard?”

Part II

The other half of McCain counter-blast is  so simultaneously snarky and high-minded that it could be a New York Times editorial. From campaign deputy spokesman Michael Goldfarb:

We all understand that partisan attacks are part of the political process in this country. The debate that stems from these grand and sometimes unruly conversations is what makes this country so exceptional. Indeed, our nation has a long and proud tradition of news organizations that are ideological and partisan in nature, the Huffington Post and the New York Times being two such publications. We celebrate their contribution to the political fabric of America. But while the Huffington Post is utterly transparent, the New York Times obscures its true intentions — to undermine the candidacy of John McCain and boost the candidacy of Barack Obama — under the cloak of objective journalism.

The New York Times is trying to fill an ideological niche. It is a business decision, and one made under economic duress, as the New York Times is a failing business. But the paper’s reporting on Senator McCain, his campaign, and his staff should be clearly understood by the American people for what it is: a partisan assault aimed at promoting that paper’s preferred candidate, Barack Obama.

Goldfarb is right.

John Steele Gordon, over at Commentary, puts it in historical perspective:

This is something very new. Politicians have been complaining about specific news stories since modern media first developed in the 1830’s and 40’s. And they have complained about individual organizations that made no secret of their biases, such as the Chicago Tribune under Robert R. McCormick in the 1930’s and 40’s and its campaign against FDR and the New Deal.

But I can think of no instance when a campaign has taken on a news organization as nationwide and as powerful as the New York Times, and publicly accused it, in effect, of journalistic prostitution

That the McCain campaign has decided that is a net plus for them to do so is, perhaps, a sign of just how much less powerful the mainstream media have become in the last decade as the Internet has broken their monopoly as gatekeepers of information. And it is certainly a sign of the decline of the New York Times from its once unquestioned position as the world’s most powerful newspaper to its present sad state.

I imagine the Gray Lady is not happy being called merely a dishonest version of Arianna Huffington.

Yes, the New York Times has hurt itself in all this. Every questionable story shrinks its reputation; every drop of river water erodes rock, reducing the once mighty to pebbles. It takes a long while. But the New York Times has been at this dangerous game for at least a generation. Results are visible. Its market capitalization is now roughly equal to the daily variation in Google’s capitalization. Soon, it may be no more powerful than Ozymandias.

Watch a YouTube clip of The View yesterday and ask yourself: Does this sound like a man working night and day to get Obama elected?

President Clinton sounds oddly detached, making analysis more powerful. (Indeed, he sounds less partisan than many pundits on talk tv.) He makes a good point that receives thunderous applause. After a long aside about how voters make up their minds, he says he have to stop looking for reasons to tear someone just because we are going to vote for the other guy. He’s right. The kind of rabid partisan that has spread from the web to tv is ultimately bad for the country.

Let’s think about this a little, though. Why are GOP negative television and radio advertisements often effective? They cut through the clutter and either raise new issues or old ones in a fresh way.  If the press were more even-handed is examining issues as they come up, there would no shock value (and therefore benefit) from this ads. Instead, the press buries anything that might hurt Democrats. Compare the coverage of Palin versus Biden or Rep. Charlie Rangel. So the first most voters here of it is on the web, talk radio or a 30-second tv spot. That gives little time for a Democratic candidate to respond to issue in context–their responses are necessarily sound-bites and spots. In short, I suspect that this hyper-partisan atmosphere is driven by the press’ failure to weigh the merits and not pardon the offenses of politicians. Like welfare, media bias hurts those it is trying to help.

Next, in the Clinton appearance we hear a fair amount of praise for McCain. This is fair minded and clearly not an endorsement of the Republican nominee. Still, the heartburn in the Obama campaign must be off the Alka-Seltzer charts…

Finally, is the bombshell the press missed. Clinton says that Hillary didn’t really want to be vice president but would have accepted it as “her duty” if need be. Okay, some of this is sour grapes. On the other hand, if she thinks Obama is a loser, she may not want to be tainted by his loss. Kerry’s defeat didn’t position Edwards very well for the 2008 race. The Clinton calculatrix is always calculating.

Over at Wizbang, a fascinating look inside the raw numbers of the lastest Gallup Organization’s polls.

Skip the opening paragraphs about “trolls,” and dive into the numbers he dissects. If you look at the raw numbers, McCain is significantly ahead of Obama and his support is steady or growing in all categories. Meanwhile, Obama is steady or falling in all categories.

But Gallup reports Obama up over McCain by two points. Why? The weighting of voters–basically a guestimate about voter turnout–has changed over at Gallup, favoring Republicans during their convention but now favoring the Democrats. All polling organization weight the numbers. The question is how.

Now, here is where it gets fascinating. Wizbang re-weights the numbers to match ratios established by exit polls (polls of voters exiting the voting booth) in the past few presidential contests. Result: Obama 39%, McCain 45%.

Could Wizbang be right? If voter turnout doesn’t change substantially, yes, he could be right. Read his post and decide for yourself.

One hypothesis I would add: Republican and Republican-leaning independents are now favoring McCain because they took his pick of Palin as a signal that he will govern as a conservative, not a RINO.

And that, of course, is why liberals hate Palin. They wanted an election between two liberals, a hard and soft option.  And now they are disappointed. So they want to punish McCain through Palin.

Conservatives are biologically different from the rest of us; they are fearful creatures who sweat when shown gruesome images. This is the finding published in Science, once America’s premier peer-reviewed scientific journals.

This article in London’s Daily Telegraph sums up the results.

The study is the work of gaggle of scientists from across the country: professors Douglas Oxley, Kevin Smith and John Hibbing and others at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, alongside  professor John Alford at Rice University, Matthew Hibbing at the University of Illinois, and Peter Hatemi at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics.

But don’t be fooled. This is, at best, pseudo-science. While bloggers Glenn Reynolds and Ann Althouse seem to be giving the study some smidgen of credence, here is why you should not:

Sample Size. There were only 46 people tested. Hardly enough for a statistically valid sample. Assuming half of the sample was made up by the non-conservative control group, that suggests only 23 “conservatives” were tested.

Selection bias. Next, the subjects were not randomly selected; they were volunteers. This is elementary selection bias.

Definition of Conservative. Researchers labeled as “conservative” any one who believed this set of things, according to the Telegraph: “support for military spending, warrantless searches, the death penalty, obedience, patriotism, the Iraq War, school prayer and Creationist views, and opposition to pacifism, immigration, gun control, foreign aid, compromise, premarital sex, gay marriage, abortion rights and pornography.”

This a stereotype cross-dressing as an objective definition. I know of many conservatives who oppose all of the things that this gaggle of scientists thinks would define them as conservatives. How can obedience be a key conservative trait, when most conservatives favor deregulation, a smaller state and fewer govenrment orders in their lives? Some elements of the definition are tendentious: no one favors warrantless searches, what many favor is warrantless surveillance of non-citizens often who are outside the United States. (Since the call is connected through network inside the U.S., lawyers have argued that FISA warrants are necessary. Whatever the legal merits of that view, listening in on enemy communciation is a well-established practice in war time–even if some civilian chatter is intercepted as well.)

The other half of definition is equally silly. In practice most conservatives oppose premarital sex and pornography only for their daughters, not themselves. And they can be right both times.

And what about the many conservatives who are immigrants? Or the children of immigrants? Are they supposed to be opposed to immigration to join the Conservative Club?

We could pick on both sides of this definition all day long, but would just be shooting fish in a barrel. The point is established: researchers defined a conservative as a Moral Majority yokel from 1979, someone who even at the dawn of the Reagan Revolution made up a part of a broad and variegated movement.

And mistaking a part for a whole is a key blunder that contaminates the study.

Imagine if one defined as a liberal someone who favored communal farms over cities, wanted to see the abolition of cars and other private transportation, wanted free love and legal marijuana, wanted to abolish the department of defense and replace it with a department of peace, believed that police and poverty cause crime,  that religion is a cunning trick practiced by televangelists and so on. Many conservatives would chuckle at this definition and insist that there is some truth to it. But any sophisticated observer would note two things: most liberals do not hold these views and this collection of views sounds like a 1971 hippie, not a contemporary adult.

The study contains an obvious problem. What about liberals who become conservatives or vice versa?  Do their impulses change? If so, by how much? Why wasn’t this studied?

Finally, the whole study is naive. The main author, Hibbing, believes that the study can eliminate political conflict. Again, from the Telegraph: “If political beliefs do run as deep as we suggest, it becomes easier to understand why political conflict is so persistent. It’s not that those who disagree with us politically are being intentionally stubborn but rather that the world seems very different to them. Perhaps recognition of the deep physical nature of these differences will increase political tolerance and understanding…”

Translation: it is not that conservatives are unwilling to see the light, they may be biologically incapable of seeing the light.

Smug, isn’t it?

A less naive approach would say something like this: people differ politically because they do not value all goods equally and rank goods differently than others do. Some value liberty more than order; others value self-development over hierarchy. The list of political goods to rank is long and the order of them varies as much as people do, though people seem to cluster around election day.

Political disposition does not seem to emerge from biology (any more than a preference for scotch over bourbon does), but it does appear to be mildly heritable. No one is destined to be a Republican or a Whig or a Democrat or a Monarchist, but parents are part of cornucopia of causes that influence one’s politics.

How did this study come about? Eliminating the numerous unnamed graduate students and other drones employed, the study suggests a ratio of 7.6 subjects per scientist.  While this ratio alone tells us nothing of scientific value, it reminds us of an old rule: large idiocies require committees.

The hacker is David Kernell, the 20-year old son of Mike Kernell, a Democrat and elected  state representative in Tennessee, according to Nashville’s largest newspaper, the Tennessean.

I predict that the same crowd that said that Palin should have been able to control her 17-year old daughter will defend the 2o-year old hacker by saying no one can control their kids. At least they will be right once.

If State Rep. Kernell refuses to cooperate with the investigation, the story will get more interesting.

Still, it will be interesting to see what hacker David Kernell has to say for himself.  Why did he do it? What did he think he would find? Does he think he did something wrong? Who introduced him to the Associated Press, which ran with the story? And why did they protect him, even after his father was willing to give him up?

There is a lot more to this story than has emerged so far. Hopefully some enterprising blogger will dig it out…

UPDATE: Terry Frank has screen shots of his facebook pages. Seems there might be a connection to the Obama campaign.

SECOND UPDATE: A well-informed Tennessee radio host Steve Gill told me this about the hacker’s dad: “He is an extremely left-wing Representative from Memphis who has been in the legislature 32 years and has never had any job other than professional politician.”

Makes you wonder what the dad’s role was, if any…

“Deregulation” and “short selling” are the two causes of the Wall Street crisis, at least if you listen to the talking heads on cable television.

And they are provably wrong.

Regulation of the stock markets has increased in the Bush years (remember Sarbanes-Oxley?) and Democratic critics can not cite a single regulation that they asked for that has not been improved.

Indeed, it was the government role in the mortgage business that ignited the crisis. Just as the Savings and Loan disaster of the early 1990s was caused by government intervention (in short, backing deposits of S&L’s while relieving them of consequences), so Fannie and Freddi Mac and the other government-sponsored enterprises were able to take excessive risks thanks to an implicit government backing. When you privatize the reward and nationalize the risk, you buy a world of trouble.

Indeed, we should use this crisis to end all government support for the GSEs. How is the tricky question…

Economist John Lott lays out a strong case that Fannie and Freddie Mac, in league with Bear Sterns and Countrywide, encouraged regulation that caused the current mess.

As for short selling, those talking heads are selling ignorance. People can only sell short when others want to buy–and people only buy shorted stocks when they think that they will go up and thereby make them money. What enables a sale to occur is when two people place different values on a good. If they agreed, there would be no sales. So short selling simply moves stocks from people who believe the stock will plunge to people who believe it will rise. Short term that is bad news for the banks whose stocks have been shorted–their market caps will shrink. But the buyers of those shorted bank stocks are betting that their values will return to normal over the next weeks and months–and they are probably right.

Bottom line: short selling occurs based on information and trendlines that leads some to sell and some to buy. It doesn’t cause downturns (information does), but creates a way for solid companies to rebound.

As Election Day approaches, even Spanish-speaking radio hosts can’t resist the lure of “gotcha” questions.

Senator John McCain has recently interviewed on Radio Carocol Miami. You can listen to the interview in English here (it was later dubbed into Spanish).

Talking Points Memo and the rest of the blogosphere’s left side are whooping it up. McCain doesn’t know who the head of the Spanish government is!

Here is Josh Marshall:

At first it sounds like McCain is taking a hard neocon line against Prime Minister Zapatero, but as the interviewer continues to press the point, it becomes pretty obvious that McCain has no idea who she’s talking about.

His broad, generic answer is clearly meant to cover Latin American leaders generally, known and unknown — sort of a blanket “we’ll stand up to tinpot dictators” — even if they happen to be NATO prime ministers.

Marshall et al are arguing in bad faith.

McCain correctly names the leaders and accurately describes the political situations in Venezuela, Columbia, Bolivia and (later) Mexico. When the interviewer, whose thick accent makes her hard to understand at times, suddenly shifts to Spain, she says Zaperto’s name very quickly. For a moment, it sounds like she is talking about a rebel leader in a region of southern Mexico–and the interviewer is pushing very hard for McCain to agree to a meeting with the man.

It is, at best, unclear that McCain does not know whom she is speaking about. McCain certainly says nothing to that effect. And the interviewer, who says the name very quickly, does not identify the man on first reference.  She is playing gotcha.

Did she trap McCain? I would say no.

McCain is a canny enough politician not to agree to any meeting with any leader until the staff work has been done. That is why “summits” are mostly for show–the two staffs have already hammered out a deal. And he announced his general principles for meeting with foreign leaders (shared values about human rights, democracy et cetera).

McCain is also savvy enough not the insult the sitting government of a key NATO ally (that withdrew its forces from Iraq) by being too pointed in questioning Spain’s commitment to spreading democracy.

While only McCain knows for sure whether he actually knew that the interviewer was talking about the head of Spain, any fair-minded referee would have to say that this is either a pass for McCain or a draw.

That the left side of the blogosphere is so desperate to score it as win–proof that McCain isn’t fit to be president–is a sign of how they think the election is going.

Even a few weeks ago, that question would have been a punchline. Now it is a legitimate inquiry. In our 50-50 nation, the election could go either way.

The always interesting Russ Smith predicts that some Democratic activists would cry “vote fraud” and decry “Swift Boat-style” ads–and, of course, attack the fly-over sections of the country for their boneheadedness. Of course. Any political party dominated by lawyers is constitutionally unable to avoid being sore losers.

But the most interesting aspect of Smith’s analysis looks back at the shock among Democratic shock troops when Sen. Kerry  lost in 2004. Smith writes:

Today, John Kerry is mostly a pariah in Democratic circles, seen as an effete and cautious campaigner who couldn’t even beat the laughable George Bush. Yet people, and the media, forget how shocked his supporters were four Novembers ago, so certain that Bush’s Supreme Court “selection” in 2000 would be overturned.

An article in The New York Times shortly after the election described the utter devastation felt by New York City residents, who gave Kerry 75 percent of their votes. Dr. Joseph Zito, a retired psychiatrist, told the reporter, “I’m saddened by what I feel is the obtuseness and shortsightedness of a good part of the country—the heartland… New Yorkers are more sophisticated and at a level of consciousness where we realized we have to think of globalization, of one mankind, that what’s going to injure masses of people is not good for us.” A friend of Zito’s, a native of Wisconsin, added, “New Yorkers are savvy. We have street smarts. Whereas people in the Midwest are more influenced by what their friends say.”

But who says New Yorkers are elitists?

A Beverly Hills psychologist, Cathy Quinn, told a Los Angeles Times reporter—also days after the Kerry defeat—that she’d seen an increase in the number of patients, who were suffering from “despair.” Quinn predicted to the Times’ Melissa Healy that the “postelection” blues would worsen the emotional health of people already plagued by feelings of loss, anxiety and depression.

Obama is much more than Kerry could ever be. Obama’s biography is straight out of a Democratic dream factory; his being touches and excites every element of the vast and varied Democratic party coalition. He and his wife are activist lawyers; he is connected to both the 1960s radicals (Ayers et al) and the Daley Democrats who beat them up in 1968 (Michelle’s father was a Daley ward heeler). Obama is not only an environmentalist-surfer from Hawaii, but he is a better public speaker than Keanau Reeves. He is an author-intellectual yet he can emote. He is telegenic and fit, yet has one perfect flaw: he is struggling in his fight against cigarettes. He has no problem with his wife earning more than he does while he decries the fact that, on average, women earn less than men in the some positions. He is Christian, but not born-again. And so on. He is an absolutely perfect incarnation of the liberal dream.

If Obama is rejected by voters, liberal activists will face a difficult moment. Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, sure. There was something wrong with them. A failure to connect. A remoteness. A coldness felt in some feathers of the left wing. Bill Clinton was an electoral success, but something about him didn’t sit right. The drama. The southerness. The welfare reform. The zaftig valley girl. Activists can understand why voters might have punished Hillary for the sins of Bill.

But Obama? He is perfect.

A rejection of Obama can only mean one of two things: a rejection of the 1960s formulation of liberalism (the current formulation, alas) or that America is deeply racist. Too many of them will go for the second hypotheses.

Too many think that elections turn on identities, not ideas.

If Obama loses–and it is still a big ‘if’–too many liberals will fail to heed the message that voters have been sending them since 1981. Seventy percent of the country is tired of 1960s liberalism. Indeed many find the hippie vision frightening: A country too ashamed of itself to fight its enemies, too unsure of itself to praise its own history,govern its children or corral its criminals,and too resentful of the rich to allow the economy to make more of them.

And I predict that, if Obama loses, liberals won’t ask the key question: If, instead, we had tried 1990s Clinton-DLC liberalism, would it have worked?

In an interview with CBS News, Mark Penn, who was President Clinton’s pollster and later Senator Clinton’s adviser, recently made a sharp point about the media’s seeping credibility.CBSNews.com: Your former colleague Howard Wolfson argued that you all unintentionally paved the way for Palin by exposing some of the unfair media coverage that Hillary Clinton received. And, therefore, a lot of the media may now be treating Sarah Palin with kid gloves. Do you agree with that?Mark Penn: Well, no, I think the people themselves saw unfair media coverage of Senator Clinton. I think if you go back, the polls reflected very clearly what “Saturday Night Live” crystallized in one of their mock debates about what was happening with the press. I think here the media is on very dangerous ground. I think that when you see them going through every single expense report that Governor Palin ever filed, if they don’t do that for all four of the candidates, they’re on very dangerous ground. I think the media so far has been the biggest loser in this race. And they continue to have growing credibility problems. And I think that that’s a real problem growing out of this election. The media now, all of the media — not just Fox News, that was perceived as highly partisan — but all of the media is now being viewed as partisan in one way or another. And that is an unfortunate development. CBSNews.com: So you think the media is being uniquely tough on Palin now? Mark Penn: Well, I think that the media is doing the kinds of stories on Palin that they’re not doing on the other candidates. And that’s going to subject them to people concluding that they’re giving her a tougher time. Now, the media defense would be, “Yeah, we looked at these other candidates who have been in public life at an earlier time.” What happened here very clearly is that the controversy over Palin led to 37 million Americans tuning into a vice-presidential speech, something that is unprecedented, because they wanted to see for themselves. This is an election in which the voters are going to decide for themselves. The media has lost credibility with them.  So many assumptions here: Is the media treating Palin with kid goves? Can that be asked with a straight face? Only someone who believes that the media should be a prosecutor and not a judge, a home-team quarterback and not a referee, would view the Palin coverage that way. Are we harder enough on her to stop the GOP surge?That’s Penn’s point is a large, enduring one.  The media is hurting itself by taking sides. Its credibility relies on its fair-mindedness. When it comes across as shrill and sloganeering, it becomes just another partisan player. Its power lies in its public perception and, increasingly, the public is turning on it. Too many members of the press are worried about “losing” the election. They should be worried about losing their role in American life.  

Democrats and their party’s activist wing, known as the White House press corps, have had a lot of fun belittling Sarah Palin’s experience as a city council member and mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. How many times have we heard that the population is just 9,000?(Just how many people lived in the public-housing projects that Obama organized? Nevermind.)Maybe Palin’s small-town governing experience is more worthwhile than the press wants to admit.Writing in U.S. News and World Report, Andrew Langer, president of the Institute for Liberty,  makes an interesting point about accountability:If the belief is that only policy made at the federal level is complex and grants experience to the policymaker, then how can one be trusted to ensure that policies that have to be implemented at the state and local level (i.e., unfunded mandates and the like) are reasonable and limited?The answer is, they can’t.

Local government comes with its own set of experience-accruing difficulties. It can be just as complex, the stakes just as high, but without the glamour that comes from being a member of the House, or a senator for two or 36 years. In fact, it has the potential to be much harder, for two reasons.First, you’re governing not just in the public spotlight but in and around and with your constituents. There is no buffer between you and the public if you’re a small-town or small-county executive. When you make a decision that people don’t like, you hear about it. You get phone calls, you get approached in the supermarket, people walk up to your front porch or back fence. This is just one of the reasons many local political parties have trouble at times finding people to run for office—it is tremendously stressful to be so easily accessible.Joe Biden sees real people on the train to and from Delaware, and he sees people in carefully scheduled events in the state itself. But when was the last time that Biden made a tough vote to curtail the funding for some project affecting his constituents and then had to go do his family shopping at the local grocery store? When was the last time Obama made a decision to enact some new regulatory scheme affecting small business and got approached while he was weeding in his front yard to hear complaints about it?