With Obama falling behind McCain in betting on InTrade.net for the first time this year, David Kane suggests that Obama should break with elite consensus and denounce the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:

Most of the good and great think that this bailout is absolutely necessary. I don’t think it is and, moreover, the politics of the issue line up nicely for Obama. Imagine that he said something along these lines:

For too long President Bush and the Republicans in Congress, led by Senator McCain, have put the interests of the rich and powerful ahead of the interests of working Americans. For too long, Bush and McCain have sought to comfort the rich, have tried to help Wall Street instead of Main Street. Our current recession was caused by the failed economic policies of Bush and McCain.

Yet, this week, they have gone a bailout too far. They propose to spend hundreds of billions of dollars bailing out their rich friends on Wall Street and in China. They want you, working Americans, to back up the promises made by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

But why should we? Why should regular Americans like you and me be on the hook for their failed policies? Why should our tax dollars go to Wall Street Banks and International Sovereign Wealth Funds? They invested stupidly. They should face the consequences of their mistakes.

When you make a mistake, does the federal government bail you out? No. Why should we bail them out? McCain and Bush want to send your money to China and to Wall Street.

A lot of recent Bush Administration actions are designed to kick the can down the road until January 20, 2009, when the troubles of the economy become somebody else’s problems. For Obama, however, the sooner the economic collapse arrives, the more likely he will be elected in 2008 and re-elected during a recovering economy in 2012.

In thinking about the politics, one analogy might be to FDR. Roosevelt ran in 1932 on a platform of balancing the budget. During the four month long interregnum, he behaved irresponsibly, refusing Hoover’s offers to work together on the economic crisis. This created a fear that he would be a bad president, leading to the bank-run crisis of the week leading up to his Inauguration on March 4, 1933, the lowest point of the Depression.

As he must have planned, however, FDR used the drama of the crisis he had created through his own inactivity to raise the tension to an unbearable point. So, when he finally stepped on stage on March 4th, and instantly deployed his rhetorical mastery, he appeared to be a savior. Fear switched to hope and loyalty instantly. (And the history books have all been written to blame the irrelevant Hoover, not the incoming FDR, for the bank runs of early March 1933.)

Of course, the Depression lingered under FDR for another seven or eight years, but the way he had framed it as proof of the failings of capitalism allowed him to pass a lot of liberal legislation, such as Social Security.

On the other hand, Obama’s economic ideology is one that largely assumes that the main economic problem is not a lack of prosperity, but too much inequality. Obamanomics presumes the capitalist system will generate huge prosperity, at least at the high end, so that the rich can be milked for the benefit of the non-rich (defined as an income of no more than $250k per year, which is, not surprisingly, almost exactly the most money the Obamas ever earned in a year before they got rich in 2005). The higher taxes on the rich would go to cut taxes a little for the others, and, especially, go for salaries of social service workers, his core constituency.

Obama is, in large part, a believer in Chicagonomics–not the U. of Chicago’s house brand of economics, but the City of Chicago’s brand as practiced under the Daley Dynasty. The Daleys aren’t socialists. They are true believers in the capability of corporate capitalism to pile up huge amounts of money, a portion of which they can siphon off, through taxes and shadier means, to pay off their friends and supporters in road-building contracts and in salaries and grants to social service workers to oversee the dysfunctions of the vast underclass.

And it more or less works. Chicago isn’t Detroit. The Daleys try not to kill the goose that lays their golden eggs, at least not too quickly. During periods of non-Daley rule since 1945, the parasites would freelance (e.g., each building inspector would have his hand out), driving businesses out of Chicago. But during periods of Daley hereditary monarchical rule, the Daleys would provide corporations with one-stop shopping for all their payoff needs, so businesses could plan their budgets accurately.

Of course, Chicagonomics works better for a single city with big advantages in an installed base of companies, magnificent buildings and lakefront, and crucial transport nodes than it does for a whole country.

Moreover, we are now realizing that some of this prosperity that Obama hoped to tap was a house of cards.

Personally, I think the way to win in 2008 would be to run against the Bush-McCain grand strategy of Invade the World, Invite the World, In Hock to the World. (By the way, how’s that working out for you?) But that’s too simplistic for the ever-so-sophisticated Obama.

Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” blunder is a reminder that he needs to hire a jokewriter so he can poke some much-needed fun at himself. Over the last dozen days, the whole race has wandered off into old-fashioned American comedy (what could Frank Capra have done with a Sarah Palin character?), leaving the new-fangled Obama rattled.

Jeez, when somebody makes a joke about the the stupid job you had when you were in your 20s, you make a joke back. You don’t get all hurt, peeved, and self-righteous like Obama did about Palin’s little “community organizer” witticism. Maybe his “lipstick” line wasn’t aimed at Palin, but he ought to have expected that everybody would take it that way by now.

Obama’s Achilles heel has always been that his gimlet-eyed appraisal of human beings doesn’t extend to himself–he can’t keep from feeling sorry for himself. It seems like a hundred years ago that I called Obama “a close student of other people’s weaknesses, a literary artist of considerable power in plumbing his deep reservoirs of self-pity and resentment, an unfunny Evelyn Waugh…” (Waugh could never stop feeling sorry for himself that he was born into a merely affluent, respectable family rather than a rich, aristocratic one. Obama’s sad “story of race and inheritance” is more complicated, but still rather similar.)

That’s why Dreams from My Father,reads like the Brideshead Revisited of law school application essays.

The GOP brain trust (if such an oxymoronic body exists) will sooner or later figure that out and try to spend the rest of the campaign poking and prodding Obama’s delicate self-image to see what happens.

In one of his half-brilliant, half-wrongheaded insights, Spengler suggests:

“Combine a child’s response to serial abandonment with the perspective of an outsider, and Obama became an alien species against which American politics had no natural defenses. He is a Third World anthropologist profiling Americans, in but not of the American system.”

Sometimes, Obama reminds me of the persona Christian Lander invented for the narrator of Stuff White People Like: the mild-mannered but cold-blooded interloping observer/exploiter of upper-middle class Americans’ self-delusions and status anxieties. (Perhaps Lander had Obama in mind?) Those traits can take you a long way, but Obama may have to show a little more to go all the way.

Senator Obama said:

“[Palin] was for [the Bridge to Nowhere] until everybody started raising a fuss about it and she started running for governor and then suddenly she was against it,” Mr. Obama said, speaking over an applauding crowd in Michigan. “I mean, you can’t just make stuff up. (Maybe, maybe not.] You can’t just recreate yourself [Yes, you can -- See Obama 2000 vs. Obama 2001]. You can’t just reinvent yourself [The gentleman doth protest too much]. The American people aren’t stupid. [Yes, we are.]

Speaking of how stupid we are, here’s a summary of historian Rick Shenkman’s book, Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter.

Watching The Golden Spiders, a TV version of the Nero Wolfe novel made in the year 2000, I noticed that the races of two of the minor characters were changed to African-American. One was the butler at the victim’s house, a white butler in the novel, which is not implausible change,and the other was Mort, a member of the Lips Egan gang, a white gangster in the novel, black on the screen. This last seems unlikely–even today, gangs are almost always either one race or another for reasons of trust.

This was much truer in 1953, the  year show is supposed to take place, and when the novel was written.

Criminal gangs don’t have to worry about civil rights laws, they have to worry about informers. Thus, multiracial gangs are mostly only seen in movies. Steve Sailer wrote in 2003  that

As a movie critic, I see lots of films featuring one of the odder bits of Hollywood hokum: the multiethnic criminal gang.

You know, the kind of mob that’s as diverse as the cover of the University of Wisconsin recruiting brochure after the admissions office gets done Photoshopping it.

There’s a white guy, a black guy, an Asian girl, a Sikh, a Lubavitcher, an Amish farmer, a whatever.

When you see a multiracial gang, you can be sure the overall movie is lame. Do you remember “The Truth About Charlie”, “Femme Fatale“, “Don’t say a Word”, “Atlantis”, and “What’s the Worst that Could Happen?“

You don’t? Well, neither did I until I looked them up. And, heck, I reviewed all of them within the last two years.

(The exception that proves the rule: “Ocean’s Eleven,” which reveled in just how contrived is the Eleven’s diversity. As Brad Pitt tells George Clooney when they discuss whom to recruit, “Off the top of my head, I’d say you’re looking at a Boesky, a Jim Brown, a Miss Daisy, two Jethros, and a Leon Spinks, not to mention the biggest Ella Fitzgerald ever.”)

When Steve wrote that, I thought of the original Ocean’s Eleven, with Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack. This was a much more modestly multicultural crew–various American ethnics (Italian, Irish, Jewish, WASP, and whatever Akim Tamiroff was ), plus Sammy Davis Jr. And there was a reason for their variety, limited though it was. They were supposed to have been in the Army together in World War II.

On the other hand, I have no idea what Sammy Davis Jr. was supposed to be be doing in the Prohibition era Chicago gang featured in Robin and The Seven Hoods: but here he is breaking up a rival gang’s saloon on behalf of Frank Sinatra:

I’m tempted to try to find some way to relate that to the candidacy of modern-day Chicago machine politician Barack Obama’s candidacy, but I suspect that would be racist. (Because anything you say about Obama is racist.) Besides, Obama doesn’t believe in gun rights.

After my blog Fairness at the Washington Post!!! WSJ next? noting their carrying of an immigration skeptic article by Steve Camarota of CIS, a reader pointed out that this was just the standard MSM stratagem of throwing Immigration Patriots a very occasional bone. Of course, this is true. But there is an infinite difference between a little and absolutely nothing, which is what we get from the Journal. The Journal even buries the comments section!

Before the Washington Post closed their comments section, 73 had posted, and they also ran three letters. One was a succinct approval from our contributor Don Collins stressing the environmental aspect of a 44% increase in the US population by 2050. The other two were hostile – fair enough, I suppose, given the slant of the article.

One was a bone-headed recital of the aging population/immigrants needed fallacy by “Michael Fishman President Local 32BJ Service Employees International Union”

The Service Employees International Union under its Ivy League-educated leader Andy Stern, apparently decided some time ago to abandon American workers in favor of building a constituency amongst the immigrants, many illegal, who work in the hotel and janitorial trades.

The other letter is far more significant:

It’s alarming that The Post decided to publish an opinion piece from the Center for Immigration Studies. CIS is a spin-off of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an organization that has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. FAIR and CIS share a founder as well as some board members, advisers and funders.
Groups such as CIS have proved themselves successful at manipulating and obscuring the truth with repercussions manifested in the nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment that has incited attacks against immigrants and native-born Latinos in their workplaces and communities.
If The Post wants to foster an intellectually honest debate on the sensitive topic of immigration, it has to be more balanced and careful when selecting its opinion pieces.

HECTOR E. SANCHEZ
Director of Policy and Research
Labor Council for Latin American Advancement
Washington

The “Labor Council for Latin American Advancement” (Warning: shockingly clunky web site) is a Latino spoils-grabbing outfit of the type white Americans are not allowed to have.

It is crucial to grasp what Sanchez said. “Because A has a connection (according to me) with B, and B has been denounced by C (In my opinion a deity) therefore A should not be allowed to speak.”

This gets to the heart of what modern immigration is doing to America. Free Speech is an extremely rare and anomalous exception to the human rule, found almost exclusively in North West Europe, and really only in the “Anglo Saxon” societies. It was fundamental to the original American Society.

It was absolutely not present in the heritage of Hector Sanchez. If truly Spanish, welcome to the Inquisition. If South American, is he showing Aztec Impulses?

Whatever the fact, it is not compatible with a Parliamentary system.

As for the SPLC Pogrom operators, our old friend Deena Flinchum (quite active at the Washington Post Web site, apparently) has a definitive response:

The SPLC has been so thoroughly discredited that I am surprised that it still gets mentioned. It started out as a civil rights organization - one which I personally contributed to for years. As true racist groups like the KKK basically ceased to exist as anything more than a tiny group and as real racists acts became fewer and fewer, the SPLC turned to researching so-called “hate groups”, calling almost any group that didn’t agree with them a “hate group” or a group that is somehow connected to a “hate group”. It raises huge amounts of money, pays its top staff huge salaries, and by and large does no civil rights work anymore because in chasing “hate groups” it doesn’t have to prove anything in court. It can make baseless charges and continue shaking down well-meaning but unknowing people for donations.

I stopped giving to them years ago when they stopped doing civil rights work and began hurling the term “racist” at anybody who opposes the horrific devastation that increased immigration is wreaking on the US environment, its health care, its schools, it neighborhoods, and its unskilled workers, many of whom are African-Americans - the very group that SPLC started out to help.

An interesting aside here is that the SPLC apparently isn’t interested in the fact that Hispanic gangs in CA are systematically driving African-Americans out of neighborhoods that they have lived in for decades - a true act of violent racisim in which African-Americans are targeted because of their race. Where is the SPLC on this?

Tell Hector Sanchez he needs to study up on what being an American actually means (apart from welfare benefits).