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…

Apologies, I’ve been slammed working on a huge presentation that’s due next Tuesday. I will, however take time out Thursday evening to join non-Frantics fan Mike Malloy on a bunch of random radio stations. I’ll be watching the debate with a bunch of Democratic partisans and Patterico, and we’ll be doing a roundtable shortly afterward – I think from 7:30 to 9pm. Check the list of stations, and if you’re in one of these cities, have XM or Sirius – join us!! There’s a call in number, and once I get it, I’ll post it here.

And, because the first pitch in the NLCS will be tossed out in an hour, and it’s between my not-beloved-but-befonded Los Angeles Dodgers and the hapless Chicago Cubs, I leave you with the late, great Steve Goodman:

So spent the weekend being a Good Corporate Spouse ™ in Monterey where we go for TG’s big conference every other year.

She doesn’t usually ride, and so when we leave Sunday, she usually drives down with a Trustee, and I get to spend the afternoon swooping over the great curvy roads (Carmel Valley, Highway 25, Jolon, Peachtree Valley, etc. etc.) between Monterey and home. This year she managed to wangle it so she rode, too, and we had a great trip up, leaving Thursday evening and arriving at the Treebones Resort in Gorda, at the south end of Big Sur, then leaving there early in the morning and arriving midmorning in Monterey so she could conference and I could do a little work sitting in the hotel patio.

The plan was to head back as I usually do Sunday at noon – but she was running a fever and was obviously sick and/or exhausted, so I made the (yes, overbearing; yes, control-freakish; yes overprotective) call that we’d stay the night and see how she felt this morning. I just wasn’t comfy with her doing a hard, dangerous day’s ride feeling as ‘off’ as she obviously did.

She slept all afternoon, I woke her to take her to dinner, then we got up this morning and had a very leisurely trip straight down the 101. Kind of a bummer, right?

Well, no. She slept all afternoon, then I took her out to a well-known place that turned out to be a seriously great restaurant – PassionFish – in Pacific Grove. Let’s just say ‘wow’. Absolutely someplace you ought to go if you’re in the Monterey area.

Then today, among the several stops we made to relax was ‘Chef Rick’s‘ restaurant in Santa Maria, a not so well-known place.

It’s kind of unprepossessing – sitting in a midmarket mall on the south edge of town. But damn – I said, damn – it was good. I’m glad it isn’t close to home, because I’d want to eat there every day. Garlic soup I’d kill to get the recipe for, an oyster po’ boy that Grace devoured, and shrimp, mushrooms, and angelhair pasta that was the furthest thing from the bland dish you so often get.

If you’re ever in Central California – or even if you’re kind of close to Central California (like, say, in Arizona) – you ought to go to this place.

So if she hadn’t gotten a little sick, we would have had a great ride, been home a day earlier, but would have missed out on two great meals…a tradeoff that might be well worth making.

So I watched most of the debate at the hotel bar – with about 100 other people (it was a full house and I was sitting on the floor with a few dozen others).

Overall, meh. My comment to TG was that neither of the candidates melted into green goo on camera, meaning that each of them managed not to screw up badly enough to cost them the election.

And I realized that that’s kind of a metaphor for how this election is running – each candidate desperate not to screw the pooch, playing defensively and probing for weaknesses rather than making full-throated claims about what they are, believe in, and where they want to take the country. That’s massively depressing to me, because it seems like we’ve lost what each of them brought to the table that made them good candidates in the first place.My support for Obama is still strongly there, if eroded (more by his issues with free speech and my disdain for many of his supporters than anything else). I’ll do a post this week explaining why, and explaining why the audience of a hawkish blog like this ought to reconsider their kneejerk support for McCain.

But searching deep in my reactions to Obama’s performance last night, I didn’t remotely see anything in his performance that could make me – or anyone who’s not already drunk his Kool-Aid – an enthusiast.

McCain’s opportunity here was to knock Obama out of the game, to make him “um” and “uh” and show that his smooth, intelligent, oratory isn’t matched by an ability to think in real time. Didn’t happen. McCain also need to come across as more appealing – to be the warm, funny, self-depricating retired fighter jock that is the core of his attractive self. Instead we got the moralizing, self-righteous scold who is much less likely to connect with voters in a personal way.

I have other problems with this election right now; we’re descending into a real 19th century kind of blind partisanship, and the odds that we’ll be able to unite the country behind either candidate seem lower every day. Whoever wins, the partisans on the other side will be enraged and uncooperative – with the right blaming (justifiably, I think) the Obama-swooning press, and the left blaming vague Rovian conspiracies (a lawyer at dinner last night explained to me – in all seriousness – that Rove has ‘anointed’ Palin, and that the whole point of this election is to get her in position to take over from McCain next year. I’m afraid that I giggled a bit in response, but he liked sailing so we managed to have a civil conversation anyway).

We deserve better. To be honest, these two candidates are better men than they are showing us in this campaign. What’s wrong with them, with us, with our politics?

So I’m at the Hyatt in Monterey being a supportive corporate spouse and working on the wi-fi out on the patio.

I’m on the patio because the USAF Thunderbirds (warning: heavy FLASH site) are in town for an airshow and are doing flybys onto Monterey Airport which is just up the road, and I’m getting an impromptu airshow as the planes circle 200 feet over my head individually and in small groups.

I didn’t bring a camera, but trust me – it’s ridiculously cool.

McCain’s see Jeff G’s great post on this at Protein Wisdom – and I need to do a post on the likely [bad] consequences of this) and he should press on and try and make McCain’s campaign crumble right now.That’s more likely because of the logical perception that McCain’s offer was a ‘stunt’.

Practically, it was dumb because the place to work on the economy for both Obama and McCain is in the public eye, as a part of the campaign, not in the halls of the Senate where everything they do will inevitably be colored by association with their campaign.

It’s been a bad week for McCain and Palin (to top it off, the Enquirer is doubling down on their charges of an affair), but it’s not the final week and they can still get their feet under them. A strong performance at the debates – focusing closely on the economy – is a necessary first step.

So we’re a mega-Verizon customer, with three home phone lines, FIOS, three cell phones and a cell modem in my laptop. Our monthly bill is – well, it’s large – and has been for some time.

Here’s what this month has brought us.We realize that we really don’t need three home lines any more – in fact, we could probably just do with the home fax line. So I call to drop the least-used of the lines, my home office line, and discover that the FIOS account is linked to it. But they can’t change the database and just relink the FIOS account to another line – they have to disconnect our FIOS – meaning no phone and no Internet – for potentially three days. I’ve escalated this, and been waiting for a call back for – almost three weeks now. I’ll go chase them some more next week.

Now I use (and am addicted) to a smartphone – have had one since the old Kyocera/Palm bricks. I updated six months ago to a Palm 755p. Running the absolutely stock configuration, except for Chattermail (an email app I bought from the Palm site), my third handset has now failed on me. It’s locked in perpetual reboot mode. I managed to get it to stop by doing a hard reset…the other ones displayed a variety of problems; random lockups, failure to hang up and end calls, etc.

So first of all, bad for Palm for putting the things out in the first place.

Today, I called Verizon, and asked for a different handset. After much calm discussion, they are willing to give me a Windows Palm handset if I’ll re-up for two full years (extend my account by six months). I demurred; we’re traveling to Monterey this weekend and I don’t want to be switching phones over the weekend. Plus, to be blunt, I just don’t want anything else by Palm.

So here’s the debate – do I give up and join the Borg and get an iPhone, paying the $150 to drop my contract? I’ve been reluctant to – I like Verizon coverage, and I dislike Apple on a kind of visceral level…I’ve been waiting for the Android phones, and may switch to a Blackberry until next year when they are mature.

Whether I do it with Verizon remains to be seen.

But as an early Palm user and longtime Palm customer, I can say with some confidence that I’ve bought my last Palm device.

One of them is requests to link to worthy projects; one is a charity that aids malnourished kids around the world – the International Medical Corps.

Chosen out of 1,190 projects, “Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children” is now eligible to receive up to $1.5 million in funding. The project with the most votes receives $1.5 million, 2nd receives $500,000, 3rd $300,000, and 4th and 5th $100,000. The funding – made possible by your votes – would bring a vital lifeline to hungry and malnourished children around the world.

[If you have an AmEx card,] All you have to do is click here to vote for them, and email five or ten friends and ask them to do the same.

Take a minute, do some good.