From Computerworld –

Several digital images that Microsoft Corp. has posted on its Web site to trumpet its new “I’m a PC” advertising campaign were actually created on Macs, according to the files’ originating-software stamp.

Four of the images that Microsoft made available on its PressPass site today display the designation “Adobe Photoshop C3 Macintosh” when their file properties are examined. The images appear to be frames from the television ads that Microsoft will launch later today.

So let’s get two things out of the way.

I think Obama’s going to win.

I think Obama should win, that we’ll be better off if he does – so listen up hawks.

And once he does win, I think it’s going to rain hard rocks on the heads of a lot of us. I think we’ll see institutional death spirals in the major parties and in the media. And, shockingly, I kind of look forward to it all.

Let’s get through these one at a time.

I. OBAMA’S GOING TO WIN

Look, McCain and Palin haven’t shown that they’ve got the punch to hang with Obama and the media. There’s punch there to be had – if Patterico and Ace and Confederate Yankee were running the messaging part of the McCain campaign, I think he’d be doing better, bluntly. I started out really impressed by Steve Schmidt. Today – not so much. Look, it’s not fair that the media are looking through Palin’s used Kotex with a microscope and a gene sequencer and ignoring major stories about Obama. It’s not fair that they are editing out whole sections of speeches that McCain is giving and then slamming him for his silence.

But you know what? Politics at this level isn’t fair, and we pay our leaders to solve problems like this. There are ways to do it. Buy airtime. Run better ads. Give better speeches while you’re at it. Route around the media to the extent you can, and flood the zone with talking heads, letter writers and Youtube videos to the extent you can’t.

Managing the media beast is the first job for a president, because the first job for a president isn’t governing, it’s not managing the mechanism of the government, it’s messaging. It’s running psyops on us to keep our beliefs and hopes aligned with his (and vice versa, I should add).

So, bummer, John and Sarah, thanks for playing, see you next time (one of you at least).

II. OBAMA OUGHT TO WIN

Yeah, I know all the arguments for why he shouldn’t. Iraq, Iraq and Iraq. Reprising Kennedy’s flop in Vienna in Tehran. Launched his political career as a member of the kinda-socialist New Party.

Big Deal.

Look, I continue to be someone who sees one primary issue as central to the history of our time – are we going to kill (or allow to be killed) a shedload of Arabs because we allowed a crazed ideology to be funded by kleptocrats and delude their people into believing that they could defeat the two Satans if they really tried? I’d like to avoid this, thank you very much. And avoiding this isn’t a matter of accommodating footwashing stations in university bathrooms (although that’s something I’d be having a long hard talk with some regents about…). Sadly, the other side is more – well more millennial than that. And if they truly gain power – power over the masses of the Arab world, who today mostly just want to stop being screwed by their governments – then we’ll have a problem. Not as bad of one as they will, but a problem nonetheless.

I see two steps to avoiding that problem. The first is, simply, being stronger by being united. In the comments here and in discussions I’ve had elsewhere, the fracture line over the war appears to be the de jure boundary between parties. That’s wacked, but true. We need to stir the pot. And since I’m convinced that nothing we do can or will tip the balance if the GOP stays in power, they need to take one for the team and lose. I believe deeply that the innate impulses of even Barney Frank are in the right place. I believe that our leadership class does truly love the country an that they – like JFK – will try to do the right thing once they stumble once or twice.

As someone with skin in the game, I expect them to stumble, but really, really, hope they do not stumble too badly.

And, as I’ve said before, we’re strong enough to err on the side of calmness. Let’s go talk to people; let’s step back – having shown that we do have teeth and may use them – and let’s try chatting with people before we have to decide to shoot them.

On the domestic side, I hate to say it, but I really do support Obama. Look, he’s a crony capitalist liberal – a true denizen of the Skyboxes. But some tough decisions are going to have to be made in the next few years as we readjust our fiscal expectations a bit, and I think both that a Democrat will be able to get more from the public sector unions than a Republican will, but that in balancing the scales of sacrifice, Obama will tip them more in the direction I believe they ought to go.

III. IT GOING TO BE UGLY WHEN HE DOES

The GOP will start the slugfest as the Reagan coalition deconstructs itself. The GOP has been this weird accumulation of insider traders, courtiers selling favors, small government true believers, strong America advocates, and those seeking to recapture a traditional America which – while a great and necessary myth – really never existed. They are going to be seriously pissed off at each other after November.

The Democrats won’t be far behind, I believe. Obama may have deep roots in the Left, but nothing in his career has shown him to be anything but a sharp political operative with his eye on the main prize. Short of a Sierra Maestra story, which I refuse to believe because it’s just too damn implausible, what we have is a power-hungry (like all politicians) young man who came to the game with a core set of values (which are still buried in there) and who decided that what he liked was the game. And was damn good at it.

And if I’m wrong, I have a lot of faith in American institutions to rein him in. Unless George Soros buys them all, and installs Oliver Willis and Matt Yglesias as editors of the Daily Him.

But he has lashed together a coalition that includes folks who just aren’t going to be happy at all when he turns out to be a pragmatist. And while the GOP battle will be over what it will take to be relevant and win again – meaning that there is hope for introspection and rational thought – the Democratic side is going to be like a cage of rabid weasels.

And the media, my friends, the media. I don’t think I can tell you how badly the media has p**sed away it’s only valuable capital stock – its credibility. 30% of the people in America think Palin was a pretty good choice and that she was RF’ed by the major media. A lot of people who don’t love Palin think she got RF’ed by the media and that Obama (like Edwards) got a nod and a wink. A lot of people who love Obama don’t like the media either – so they are going to find themselves with damn little support out here in the world. The media absolutely shaped this election, let’s be clear. But the aftershocks will mean that they will have far less to say about elections in the future – assuming that they have jobs at all.

IV. WHY THIS IS GOOD NEWS

The collapse of an established – anything – whether a political order, a worldview, a movement, an industry is a time of great anxiety. And of some suffering as the winners in the old order find themselves no longer on top.

But it’s a good thing, and something that has over our history made us a great country. Because we can have these kinds of collapses and inversions and yet we’re still on our 1st Republic. So fasten your seat belts, strap on your helmets, it’s going to be a wild ride. But out of it, I genuinely believe will come two things that will be incredibly valuable to my sons.

A new political alignment as the alignment of 30 years ago splinters. And a new media universe and the major media companies go back to funding expensive entertainment and leave the newsgathering to a smaller, more agile group of people who manage – through dispute, personal witness, and the ubiquity of record – to bring us together around a new level of news.

It’s got to be frustrating as heck to be a McCain supporter – or campaign worker – these days.

We had a debate tonight in which – reading the transcript – McCain more than held his own. But watching it on TV in a bar (as I did), Johnny Mac didn’t do so well…

I said a while ago that the race would depend on which McCain showed up at the debates, the smiling fighter jock or the grumpy old guy.

McCain had two “grouchy old guy” moments – the “that one” moment when discussing the banking crisis:

By the way, my friends, I know you grow a little weary with this back-and-forth. It was an energy bill on the floor of the Senate loaded down with goodies, billions for the oil companies, and it was sponsored by Bush and Cheney.

You know who voted for it? You might never know. That one. You know who voted against it? Me. I have fought time after time against these pork barrel — these bills that come to the floor and they have all kinds of goodies and all kinds of things in them for everybody and they buy off the votes.

And then after the debate – and maybe I was the only one who saw it – as Obama was working the audience (and did you notice how everyone in the audience – all those undecided voters – wanted a picture with him) McCain came up and tapped him on the shoulder. Obama turned, and reached out to shake his hand, and McCain refused, gesturing at Cindy as though she had asked to shake his hand.

That deep dislike came across during the whole debate. I don’t know why Obama is such a target for McCain, but it keeps McCain cast in that “get off my lawn” mode, and the simple truth is that grouchy old guys don’t get elected.

So TG found a Barnes & Noble gift card I’d forgotten about and so we went off, stored value burning a hole in my pocket and bought some books.

One of them was Bernard-Henri Levy’s “Left In Dark Times” which I’d seen reviewed in the NYT by Hitchens.

And I enjoyed the heck out of the book. It’s frustrating – French.

First of all it’s in a kind of classic French style: discursive, breathless name-dropping. The arguments are piled on each other in a welter of side comments, historical references, personal sidebars, and erudition that requires frequent trips to Wikipedia to look up obscure names. So it’s not a fun read.
(Somehow appropriate and humorous anecdote: I had a professor who studied in Paris. While he was there he was invited to lunch with Habermas, who was just making a name for himself. He drove to Germany to have lunch with him, only to discover a) that H. had a speech impediment; b) that he spoke just like the wrote – impenetrably; and c) that he spoke with his mouth full. My poor professor, having driven 8 hours, sat for two hours trying to figure out what the hell the Great Man was actually saying…)

But it’s a very good book, in no small part because Levy is one of those guys who kind was always near the center of the post – ’68 French political scene.

The book is roughly divided into thirds.

The first third is a personal memoir of his connection with and struggles with the French Left, opening with Sarkozy hammering him for an endorsement, him replying that he can’t break with his ‘family’ and Sarkozy pointing out that his family had fucked him royally for some time.

The middle third is an accounting of the three ideological failures of the modern Left. The first goes to the rejection of the left of economic liberalism and the market. The second is failure of the Left to get behind the European project, and particularly the silence of the left in the face of Bosnia and the rising nationalisms that threaten Europe. The third is about anti-Americanism.

The chapter on anti-Americanism echoes very strongly with my own feelings about it, so I obviously thought it was brilliant. I have some long quotes from it below.

He rounds off with a discussion of the rise of anti-Semitism among the left, and strips away the notion that it’s tied to anti-Zionism. Instead, he connects it to the empty center of the philosophical left, which is simply tied into the rejection of – pretty much everything – and as such ties closely to the roots of the Romantic European right. (Isiah Berlin has a book – “The Roots of Romanticism” which presents a parallel argument).

He wraps up with a constructive argument for universal human rights, and against those who for lack of a better foundation want to oppose universal rights in the interest of particular cultures.

His response is pithy:

European or not, the idea that adulterous women shouldn’t be stoned to death or burned alive is an idea worth universalizing.

What’s the root of it? He lays it at Solzenitzen, who destroyed the belief that the cruelty of the Communist project led to anything.

There was no longer any talk of Revolution. There was no longer any question of a future Good in whose name people had always been ready to sacrifice present generations, short term emotions, those useless Chinese, Russian, or African dissidents.

The antitotalitarian revolution had left it’s mark, the old paradigms had been shattered; the old notion of progress no longer held water; and there was no longer the slightest sign of another world being possible, or a more radiant future, of signing tomorrows – together with a wait-and-see attitude about human rights.

That’s the hollowness at the center of the modern European Left, the hollowness that they seek to replace with a generalized “no!” and the failures he recounts above.

Here’s a selection from the chapter on anti-Americanism:

The Other Socialism of the Imbeciles

The third trait of the Left’s failu1ation of much of the world, and even some part of America, into a zone of disapproval in the same way Spinoza spoke of a zone of ignorance, has made them fall, once again, into the same trap.

I’m not talking about, of course, the legitimate criticism of one American president or another – of Bush the Lesser, for example, whose errors and mediocrity I, in American Vertigo, was not the last to denounce.

I’m not talking about the Abu Ghraib scandal, nor about Guantanamo, those regions of lawlessness, those political and juridical aberrations, which still, as I write these lines, dishonor an American democracy which elsewhere has so much vitality and virtue.

I’m not talking about my own anger when I read that an average of two people are legally killed every week on death row in Texas and elsewhere; or when I see, in a school in Virginia, the concrete result of the notion that it is every citizen’s inalienable right to possess assault rifles.

No. I’m talking about that strange hatred that, across the entire planet, focuses not on what America does or doesn’t do but on what it is.

I’m talking about that total hatred that attacks not the crimes that America, like any other nation in the world, sometimes happens to commit or to cover up: but of its being, its essence, or at least what people imagine is that essence.
And I’m talking about, in France, this anti-American religion which is like a password that is coming to unite all the neoprogressive churches: I’m talking about the way they have – in alter-globalist, pacifist, agroterrorist, Zapatista, Islamo-leftist, Sovereignist, Critical Communist, Chevenementist circles; the people from ATTAC and the members of the Cercle Saint-Just or the late Fondation Marc-Bloch; the former Reds who have now turned Green and the friends-of-nature type of Greens who have now become greens of the revolutionary jihad variety; those nostalgic for the Grand Soir no less than those reformists who want to place a radical tiger in the tank of their social criticism – I’m talking about how they all, whenever they’ve run out of things to say, say “it’s America’s fault” and turn America into a place of the damned, almost a region of Being, which is synonymous with all the crimes and sins of the human race.

Isn’t America, for such people, guilty of starving the world and of flooding it with its commodities? Of ruining the climate and of pillaging the planet’s resources? Isn’t it guilty of fighting terrorism and stirring it up? Of making war on Islamism after having encouraged and nourished it? Of being a country without culture that is flooding the world with its culture? Of being the homeland of materialism that at the same time is the seat of a spiritual revolution that is as grotesque as it is fanatical? Of having been too late to enter the war against Hitler (Long live Pearl Harbor! Thank you, Japan!) – and, when it finally made up its mind, of using methods that could have been Hitler’s (Hiroshima, the dishonor of it! The true face of the GIs, our self-proclaimed liberators, who were actually rapists, thieves, murderers – see, for example, a strange documentary recently broadcast on a public television network’)? Is there anything, any single thing, that America, has been spared, now or in the past? Didn’t France, during the Civil War, manage to be the only country in the world that was both hostile to slavery (that disgrace … that crime … unworthy of a democracy, as we’ve told you so many times before …) and favorable to a Southern victory (that civilization … that world … that admirable aristocracy … gone with the wind. . )? Wasn’t France, once again, the only country that, in Clemenceau’s words, dared to think it was odd, and even a bit suspicious, that our “Yankee” allies didn’t lose more men in the battles for France? And when, at last, September 11th came along, weren’t there plenty of people on the Left, in France as in the rest of the world, who saw the horrifying attack either as a horrifying fraud, or at the very least the result of a horrifying arrogance?

The French listened to Arundhati Roy: Bin Laden is “a dead ringer for the American president,” his “interchangeable twin brother.”
Noam Chomsky: a planetary “fraud,” the mirror image of the “racism” of the Jewish state an”atrocity’ that, in any event, didn’t “reach the level” of “Clinton’s bombing” of a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory that was wrongly believed robe a military objective.

The journalist Robert Fisk, on the first day of the war in Afghanistan, wrote that “we are the real war criminals.”

Harold Pinter, later, in his Nobel acceptance speech:6 the only, the real problem is the two million men and women locked up in the vast “gulag” that is the American prison system.

Jean Baudrillard – a great mind, in other respects – almost immediately setting the tone by explaining that it’s America’s “rising power,” its “formidable condensation of every function by the technocratic machinery and its single-minded thinking” – in a word, the “system itself” and the way it “keeps all the cards for itself” – which “has created the conditions for this brutal retaliation.”

And the battalions of beautiful souls whom we never heard squeak a word in protest against the public stoning of adulterous women in Kabul or against the numberless crimes of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad – but who, when the Americans decided to hunt down the Taliban and dethrone Saddam Hussein, rush to the streets crying “Peace in Kabul” and “Hands off Baghdad” or “Busharon murderer”…

That’s the anti-Americanism I’m talking about.

That’s the passion because it is a passion – whose genealogy and background I want to recall.

I started to do so a quarter of a century ago, in the last pages of L’Ideologie francaise: and, in light of today’s events, that’s the reflection I want to build upon here.

It all started with Rousseau.

It all started with that unprecedented book called The Social Contract, whose thesis provoked – first in France and then in Europe – a thrill, a shock, almost a spiritual earthquake.

What?

All people needed was a “general will” to create a society?

All people needed was to say “We want to be joined into a society; we don’t have anything in common but we’ve decided to join together” for such an association to exist and take effect?

Starting with a transcendental purity – an abstract and empty form, whose only principle would be the well-negotiated exchange between each member’s freedom and a superior liberty guaranteed by an agreement – a true community of men and women could come about?

People might have nothing in common – nothing, neither heroes, nor great events, nor shared miseries, nor even a common place of birth – and found a nation by a simple act of understanding – by one of the purely mind-based decisions described in the Encyclopedia, in the same terms Rousseau used in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, as reasoning “in the silence of human passions” and of “associations”?

People are never quiet about passions and associations, grumbled the Contract’s outraged readers.

Counterrevolutionaries like Burke and Carlyle mocked Rousseau, saying that nobody had ever seen a society come about through such vain and artificial methods.

When, on December 26,1815, Bonald went before the National Assembly to plead for – and obtain’ – the abolition of the divorce law that the Assemblies of the French Revolution had voted for, he insisted that

history had never known a society that was not based on this common principle, these primary and natural units, that were, for example, families.

What’s all this about the “contract,” Lamartine himself wondered, in issues 65 and 67 of his Cours familier de litterature? Societies don’t come about thanks to contracts! They can’t be decreed! They are “instinctive.” They are “inevitable.”

How could you possibly imagine – thundered Maurice Barres, once again in the National Assembly, on June 11, 1912, during a session dedicated to celebrating the bicentennial of Rousseau’s birth – how could you even conceive that the national congress could wish to glorify this “false spirit,” this “extravagant creature,” this prince of lies and artifice? I admire “the artist,” he allows. I admire “the musician.” And “the man himself, that poor and crabbed virtue allied to that lyrical love of nature and solitude, I won’t attack him.” But as for signing up for “the social, political, and pedagogical principles of the author of the Discourse on Inequality, the Social Contract, and Emile” – as for celebrating the person who “established as a principle the idea that the social order is entirely artificial,” and that it is “based on conventions” – as for anointing with the holy republican chrism the big bloated head of someone who preaches everyone’s right to “reconstruct society at whim” – as for letting France look ridiculous by celebrating that lunatic, drunk on himself and his own correctness, one whose whole life was dedicated to chasing the pipe dream of “placing all of life on a Procrustean bed” – as for following, therefore, this false prophet in his “detrimental, and moreover powerless, rebellion which advises us to act as if we had to remake everything all over again” – I won’t do that: I won’t “give him so much credit.”

Herder too followed the lead of the French Counter-Revolutionaries; also opposed to Rousseau’s bad “Gesellschaft,” that abstract entity issued from a contractualism that was obtuse and definitively deaf to the soul (the “volksseele”) and to the spirit of the people (the “Volksgeist”), the good “Gemeinschaft “which itself was founded on a community of memory and roots – Herder too, upon hearing the name Rousseau, cried that he was refusing reality, following a figment of his imagination, something arbitrary, and pulls out his naturalistic, and already volkisch, revolver…

I’m simplifying things, of course.

One could object that there are as many similarities as differences between Rousseau and Herder, and that Barres and Fichte disagree more than they agree.

But that is nonetheless the reasoning of the part of the “anti-Enlightenment” that Arendt evokes in her Origins ofTotalitarianism.

That’s exactly how, over the course of two centuries, with an inexhaustible rage, the mad hatred of Rousseau and his “contractualism” has been expressed.

If we agree that the leading figures of the anti-Enlightenment share the feeling that contractualism is the apex of the “sin of pride,” the “vice” in “all its splendor” (Burke); the image of an illegitimate government whose prince would be “more disgraced than a valet or a laborer” (Carlyle,2); but which, praise God, is all just a big fraud–so big, so enormous then one thing is sure: it will remain irrelevant.

Barres, once again, thought the Social Contract was “profoundly imbecilic.” And Renan, in a text from 1869 reproaching Napoleon III for having ceded too much to the American myth of “equal rights for all” and of transforming his government, in so doing, into a simple “public service,” without memory, without ambition, and without the ability to elicit in others that elementary political feeling known as “respect”: wasn’t he already talking about American “impertinence”?

Since this is where we realize that it’s not just a fraud.

This is where it appears that Rousseau’s construction – a utopia, a whim, a dangerous and criminal fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless – was a bit more than that.

This is where that idea, seemingly so crazy, so devoid of meaning or future prospects, incapable of bearing any relation to the real history of a real people; that idea which nobody ever imagined would go further than the project for the Constitution of a Corsica or a Poland that themselves were figments of the imagination – here’s where that flight of fancy takes shape in a place that is neither Corsica nor Poland.

Far, far away, in the New World, a real place, not a dreamland or a paper construction – where, we’re told, people have come from every end of the earth, people with different skin colors, different languages, different histories and traditions, different gods, different heroes, have de-tided to come together, to agree on a contract and to gather in a nation there is a country, America, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s project, that almost unthinkable doctrine that all people needed to do was make up their minds, then say it and swear to it, in order to create a political body, left the skies and descended earthward, where it actually came to pass.

At first, nobody can believe it.

They say it’s so absurd that it can’t last.

It goes against the grain of things and it will necessarily fail.

They say, they repeat: it’s nothing, it’s ridiculous, a remake of Glaucon’s “City of Swine” in the Republic, an experiment, a flash in the pan–it will fall just as it rose, in a cloud of dust and a burst of laughter, once reality strikes.

But here we are.

Time goes by.

The experiment has staying power.

The country Renan thought was impertinent scoffs at the serious nations.

The impossible state becomes a power, a real one, that in 1898 declares war on a large European country, Spain, and wins.

The country on paper becomes a prosperous nation as well as a political actor of the first importance which intervenes once, and then again, in the affairs of Europe: and which, during World War II, saves it.

In the darkest hours of that dark age, moreover, while a whole segment of humanity is threatened with being washed away in the flood of Hitler’s hatred, that country becomes a place of hospitality and asylum unequaled anywhere else on the planet, making the mocked, condescended-to America a gigantic Noah’s ark.

Even better: while, as Husserl warned us in his Prague and Vienna lectures, the idea of Europe is about to sink utterly, while in Germany, from the very heart of Europe, a regime claiming to unify the continent under its leadership is busily emptying that continent of its substance, amputating the best of itself, destroying its very soul, it is once again America, that supposedly “soulless” country, drunk on “materialism” and therefore “devoid of spirit,” which, in an extraordinary return, like that remainder of Israel that the biblical prophets said saved what it can from the times of catastrophe and holocaust, grabbed from the flames of nihilism the works, the books, what’s left of the libraries, the remains of the values and the people who will allow, when the time is right, to reignite the flame, the other one, the unconquered lights of the Europe of Husserl and Kant.

We have to note two things, in other words.

First, all those great minds – all those German and French Romantics, all those who were opposed to the spirit of the Enlightenment and of Rousseau – were terribly wrong, and the very fact of America – the reality of this nation made of men of different origins, of blacks and whites, of Europeans and non-Europeans, of Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Indians, Asians – is the living proof of their mistake.

Second, when traditional nations engage in an apparently unstoppable process of collective suicide; when the disaster is unleashed by those nations that ended up taking most seriously the “natural” and “anti- Enlightenment” program that had been opposed to America for two centuries; when neighboring nations, with their ancient ways of knowing and doing, with their heavy jaws and their bodies so nicely rooted in the supposed soil of their antique and collective history, throw up their hands in the face of the Beast, or frankly take his side, it’s the little, fragile, precarious upstart, the one we thought was so congenitally defective that it would hardly be able to walk without crutches – so you think it’s going to rush to someone else’s rescue! – that little upstart comes to our aid and saves us.

European anti-Americanism is born there.

From that humiliation.

Or, to put it more precisely, from a double and repeated humiliation. First of all, more recently, from the classic resentment of the debtor toward his benefactor.

As Jules Renard so wittily put it: “I don’t have any enemies, since I’ve never helped anyone.”

Or as Confucius said: “What do you have against me, since I’ve never given you a thing?”

…there’s a lot more. Get the book.

So one book I just finished reading in my travels was Joseph Ellis’ “His Excellency: George Washington.”

So here’s the fun question that the book prompts:

How might American history have been different if George Washington hadn’t been childless?

So after my “somewhat frustrating series” of interactions with Verizon, I discovered that I could keep my Palm Treo functioning as a phone by disabling all email and SMS functions. That got me through the trip to Monterey, and when I got back, I emailed a commenter with a phone store (no one replied) and called Verizon again.

Shocking how different the experience was – I got this helpful young CSR who listened to me, look at the record, and asked me to hold while he talked to his supervisor. Five minutes later he came back and said I was approved for a Blackberry 8330, and did I want it mailed to me or to pick it up in a store?

There’s a large Verizon store near me – on Lomita and Crenshaw – so I said I’d get it there.

Put me on hold for a few moments, and came back and said it was OK to go pick it up.

So – I go to the store, and the on-shift manager – massively rudely – says there’s no way I am authorized for that change, there’s no policy for it, and when I ask her to escalate, calls her manager and gives me the ‘talk to the hand’ when I try and explain to her that she’s misstating the situation.

We chatted about that…

And when I got home, the good Verizon rep called, apologized for the confusion and said he was shipping one to me.

Which arrived yesterday, took 30 minutes to set up and synch, and has run for 24 hours without rebooting while getting email and SMS messages – far better than the POS Treo 755p that it will replace.

One step at a time…

Part of what’s frustrating about this is that the bureaucracy is fundamentally Ottoman in that what comes out of it is so variable…

Having a late morning today, and just finished breakfast with TG.

In the morning, I grind beans and make her coffee – even though I hate the taste of it, I love the smell of it. So over breakfast this morning (she made omelettes), she was just commenting on how much she loves the new coffee we’ve been getting from Coffee Fool (she likes French Roast). She comments that it’s far better than Peet’s or – gasp – Starbucks (S’bux hot chocolate still rocks, however – remember to have them leave out the vanilla).

They are very smart sellers of consumables; you can simply give them a card number and they will set up a standing order for you.

So props to Coffee Fool, and if you’re a coffee addict, try them out.

So some thoughts on the debate that gelled as I was taking the Red Line back from North Hollywood to MacArthur Park (TG had an event near there, so I just took the train both ways and met her).

First, Palin really did miss the opportunity – primarily the opportunity to define the difference between her and McCain’s policies and Obama and Biden’s. She touched on her vision in her closing statements, which were about freedom, but she made no connection whatsoever between any policy responses she made and the vision she so poorly articulated.

Great political speeches and speakers do three things – they present a political vision “city on a hill”; the tie the vision to specific policies; and they establish the speaker as the vessel for that vision, someone capable of carrying out those policies, and someone the voter can viscerally believe because they feel a connection.

No one running today – not even Obama – is a great political speaker (he comes close, but he’s not there).

Palin needed to be last night to win the election. She wasn’t close.

Half the time she was warm, genuine – connectable. The other half, she was obviously working to remember her list of talking points – which she did.

Biden was smoothly spinning – and even his most outrageously stupid statements – like putting NATO troops into Lebanon (how’d that work out last time, Joe?) – were delivered with assurance and forceful confidence.

On the facts, I’d call it a draw. On presentation, you’d have to decide it on points, and the judges could legitimately score it either way.

Palin could have lost the election last night, and she didn’t, so good for her. But she could have won it as well – and didn’t – so not so good for her.

How could she have won it, and what does the debate mean to her?

Let’s go back to the movie “Dave“…

…the charm of this movie was that an average American with common sense and a good heart could wipe away the machinations that make up our political culture today; that if only we brought our suburban accountant in to look at the books, we could come up with budget plans that make more sense, and that the core of Washington politics is so jaded, cynical, and corrupt that government has a hard time delivering what the country needs.

That’s the basis of the populist narrative that has been strong in America since before William Jennings Bryan, and which ebbs and flows as the folks at the centers of power periodically forget who they really work for and what they are there to do.

If ever the time was ripe for a strong populist candidate, that time is now – and Palin was perfectly chosen as that candidate. Sadly, she hasn’t been able to deliver.

Why? I’d guess because on one hand she hold deeply populist views, and on the other, she wants to get elected, and to get elected, you’re supposed to dance in just such a particular way.

If I had to diagnose the core weakness in her and McCain’s campaign to date, it’s that they are straddling between who they really are or want to be – people who deeply believe in the idea of stripping away the weeds that are growing up around American political power – and the basic block-and-tackle traditional marketing process which is a modern campaign. The successful consultants, who have won dozens of races, or they wouldn’t be advising at that level, try and shape the traditional messaging and patterns of modern national political campaigns to the character of the candidate.

But what if the character of the candidate is rooted in the notion that the mechanisms of modern politics are flawed?

Now there’s an interesting conundrum.

Personally, having thought about the debate for a day, I still call it for Biden. …but you know, I’d be about as comfortable – or uncomfortable – with him a heartbeat away from the Presidency as I would be with her.

OK – I’ll make a tepid prediction…she’ll get a bump. It’s both because she’s a good debater, Biden is a turkey (don’t we all wish we were watching the same debate with Hillary and Palin?), and because – as Michelle Cottle said at TNR said as well as I could have:

And now the entire political world perches on the edge of its seat, wondering if tonight’s tango with Joe Biden will discredit Palin so completely that she’ll take the now-codependent John McCain down with her.

Don’t bet on it. The smart money says Palin will emerge with, at most, superficial wounds. In part, this is about the expectations game: Post-Katie, the bar has been set so low for Palin that, unless she faints or vomits on air, her team will rush to declare a victory–not just for her, but for all of Joe Six-Pack America. But it is also about Palin’s particular skill set, the audience she’s playing to, and the nature of the political media.

I’m liking Ifill, though…

And I’ll note that I’ll be on the air with Brad Friedman:

We’ll carry the debate LIVE at 6pm PT (9pm ET), followed by an in-studio “Bloggers Roundtable” until 9pm PT (Midnight ET), featuring world class bloggers:

MARCY WHEELER of Empty Wheel
DAVID “DDAY” DAYEN of Hullabalo & Calitics
MARC “ARMED LIBERAL” DANZIGER of Winds Of Change
PAMELA LEAVEY of The Democratic Daily, and;
PATRICK FREY of Patterico

Plus your calls if we can fit ’em in, at 800-989-1480. To hell with Chris Matthews, Wolf Blitzer and their professional spinners!

I may add some comments as we go…

Biden is owning her on taxes…and she’s stumbling and reaching. Biden is making a conceptual point, and she’s not…

So I’m the only one here who thinks she blew it…everyone else here thinks she did just fine…

Just went to a presentation at the Milken Institute on “Demystifying the Mortgage Meltdown: What It Means for Main Street, Wall Street and the U.S. Financial System” (video here). And it was v. interesting in a number of ways.

It also reminded me how toxic, partisan, and useless most of the discussion of the issue has been over the last month. On both sides.I’ll try and do a longer post on it (or add to this one) if I have time later, but for now one quote is worth noting immediately. In response to an audience question that asked, in short, whether the CRA requirements imposed by Congress were at the root of the problem, the answer was a resounding “no”.

We looked at CRA pools and the [post-default] returns on them is higher than the equivalent return on conventional pools.

In a nutshell, they blame the crisis on three things:

*A massively overleveraged financial sector (with FHLMC as the worst culprit);

*Horrible underwriting at every level from loan origination to S & P;

*’Toxic’ loan products which – combined with poor underwriting – allowed unqualified borrowers to take out loans they never could have been expected to repay.

Those loans were immediately securitized into the highly overleveraged financial institutions – instead of being held by the originating institutions which would have had skin in the game as to real loan quality – and when they unsurprisingly blew up, the negative leverage effects killed the institutions. This was, of course, made worse by the array of poorly designed (but fee rich!) risk-managing tools that made up much of the secondary markets (see Taleb’s Black Swan yet again)

Check out the pdf Powerpoint of their presentation.

One other note – in slide 78 they show a very disturbing survey which demonstrates how little consumers know about the loans they are taking out. I’ve been cynical about loan disclosure standards as a tool for improving loan quality, but this slide is seriously changing my mind.

Right now I’d love to ask the partisan hacks weighing in on these issues take a steaming cup of STFU and let the rest of us sit down and try as best we can to figure out what’s really going on.

One of those things is apparently a fairly healthy base economy – productivity of labor and capital continues to improve in the first part of 08, and their argument is that the ‘Main Street’ economy is not going to be nearly as badly hit as the ‘Wall Street’ economy.

That’s borne out by my personal experience; I’m in the middle of setting up some six-figure lines of credit for a company I’m a partner in, and we’ve received three attractive proposals in three weeks of looking.

More later…