Does Obama get all this? I understand the politics here. But as policy, the Bush approach to Pakistan is sheer folly. ~Blake Hounshell

Obviously, Iagreewholeheartedlywiththis point and havebeen saying the same thing for over a year, but why has there been so little comment on McCain’s apparent endorsement of the same position?  McCain objected to Obama talking about a stupid policy in public, but he did not say during the debate that the policy itself was misguided.  “If you have to do something, you have to do it,” was the philosopher-king’s remark.  Well, you can’t argue with a thing like that–because it isn’t an argument.  McCain said that we should work with Islamabad, but Obama says the same.  Both appear to be committed to perpetuating one of Mr. Bush’s latest great mistakes.

Here is the new Palin SNL skit.

In the liquidity trap, the problem is that borrowers already are paying minimal rates, but because of deflation the real interest rate is high. Clearly we’re not in that situation. Borrowers’ real interest rates are not high because of deflation. They are high because nominal rates are high, due to hefty risk premiums.

Insttead, we are in a capital trap, because the binding constraint at banks is capital requirements, not reserve requirements. Adding more reserves has no effect. If the Paulson plan is turned down, then this theory says that the binding capital constraint will lead to higher interest rates for borrowers, a slowdown in economic activity, more loan defaults, more erosion of bank capital, and a downward spiral.

I have not seen the “capital trap” theory in any macro textbook. How can we be undertaking one of the most extreme policy measures in economic history based on a theory that no one has ever studied? ~Arnold Kling

Kling’s main points against the bailout are here.  Kling elaborates in a radio interview here.

There seem to be two reasons for why Congress is pressing ahead with the bailout, the details of which they claim to have worked out tonight, and these are fear and deference to administration demands.  For that matter, making those demands requires instilling a tremendous amount of fear in members of Congress, and it appears that this fear and the desire to be seen “doing something” have overwhelmed everything else.  As I said before, the argument the administration has advanced is not persuasive.  It has failed to explain clearly why the bailout is necessary, except to say that it is necessary, no other alternative will suffice and doom awaits those who fail to submit. 

Kling has been discussing the option of reducing capital requirements as part of a solution.  As Kling says:

Lower capital requirements for bank lending to small business. The down side of lower capital requirements is that they raise the risk of bank failures, but we have a good system in place for monitoring banks and resolving failures.

The problem of tight credit and the problem of unmarketable mortgage securities can be separated. Focus on the problem of tight credit, and leave the mortgage securities alone. 

If the main fear is that lending will become impossible as credit becomes tighter, does this not alleviate a significant part of the problem?  Combined with Boockvar’s suggestion that major banks halt their dividend payments and use those funds instead for lending purposes, it seems as if there could be plausible alternatives that would not involve major government intervention.  These seem to be reasonable suggestions, and it sounds as if they would alleviate the main concern that credit would become unavailable. 

Update: Kling criticizes the bailout on bloggingheads.

Ross mentioned Palin’s oldCNBC and C-SPAN interviews as evidence of what she was capable of when she is discussing subjects she is more familiar with, but what becomes painfully clear on reviewing these is that she has an established set of rote remarks on Alaska, energy production and “hungry domestic markets” that she honed over many years and yet she has nonetheless produced confusing or nonsensical answers in connection with her presumed area of expertise in just the last few weeks.  If you watch her interview with Bartiromo, you hear all the same things that you’ve heard over the last few weeks including the apparently incorrect 20% figure she keeps throwing around, and you begin to realize that if you pressed her much on any of these points she would resort to the same bizarre filibustering that she did in the Couric interview.  Her apparent fluency and ease in the CNBC interview in particular were the products of her being allowed to speak uninterruptedly about something extremely specific to Alaska along with the relative unfamiliarity of her interviewer with Alaska.  The questions were not challenging, and there were no follow-ups demanding elaboration or specificity.  

When faced with a challenging question, Palin seems to have a habit of taking the most severe position possible, as if to demonstrate her gravitas by saying that we might have to go to war with Russia or there could be another Depression.  Whether or not she believes this or understands why this would be so, she handles challenging questions by overcompensating and saying more than she needs to say in order to make her point.  This goes beyond a lack of experience handling members of the national media.  Instead of seeing a challenging question as an attempt to elucidate something that is obscure, she treats it as if it were a trick, and she thinks that by her own sort of “straight talk” on war and depression she has avoided falling for the trick.  Follow-ups and specific questions are where she gets tripped up worst of all.  As her old rival Halcro seems to have noted correctly about her debate performances in Alaska, she has a habit of falling back on generalities and “happy talk.”  Her interview with Couric was a glaring example of exactly that, but taken to a gruesome extreme as the cheerfulness and generalities seem to have overloaded all circuits and caused a system crash. 

It isn’t just that she is more comfortable discussing energy issues, but that she used to be able to talk about Alaska without many other people being able to gainsay her, and even on issues relating to Alaska she was not what you would call a detail-oriented person.  As the factcheck.org report suggests, even the details that she does cite may not be reliable.  She is essentially the anti-Romney; she is the antithesis of a technocrat.  If he thinks “getting into the weeds” is important, she wants to race right by them.  That is part of the reason why a lot of people love her, and why most people detest Romney.  This is not because she could not familiarize herself with these details; she just seems to have no inclination to do that.  As she said, “I look out over the audience, and I wonder: Is that really important?”  Her answer to that concerning most of these issues seems to be, as she might say, “Nope.”

If there is another thing that we’re learning from her record it is that she doesn’t respond at all well to criticism, and she has made such a habit of shielding herself from it or ignoring that I suspect she has not learned how to deflect or refute it, which compels her to keep repeating whatever tried and true lines she thinks might be remotely relevant to the question.   It cannot help when she is put on network television after being shielded from any and all contact with the media and asked about subjects she hasn’t practiced talking about very much, and it cannot help her that she probably was told early on that she knew nothing and she became aware that her handlers believed that she knew nothing.  Still, it seems clear to me that her flubbed interviews were not accidental, but were bound to happen when a politician elevated mainly through the “gut-level connection” had to say something coherent about the pressing issues of the day.  Palin’s political style is the logical extreme of the Bushian folksiness-trumps-expertise and McCainesque “authenticity”-trumps-policy approaches.  She is a natural product of mass democracy’s ongoing pursuit of charismatic mediocrity, in which voters not only seek someone with whom they can identify but also actively discourage politicians’ cultivation of expertise.  Expertise grates against their egalitarianism, and so they try to avoid it in their political leaders. 

Ironically, McCain’s efforts last night to portray himself as an expert on foreign policy, combined with his irascibile put-downs of Obama, probably did more to sabotage his cause than anything else.  Like a lot of Palin defenders after the Gibson interview who complained that they, too, couldn’t have explained what the Bush Doctrine was, many of the undecided voters watching the debate probably took umbrage at McCain lecturing on this or that policy that they may not have understood very well, either.  In this way, the candidate so often described as “aloof” and professorial managed to establish that “gut-level connection” with viewers in a way McCain never did, because he expressed empathy and paid at least some lip service to the average voter’s concerns.

Peter Boockvar offers an interesting alternative to the bailout plan, and responds soberly to the preachers of catastrophe.

For years I have read progressives complaining about the Democratic “defensive crouch” on national security, that instinctive, fearful huddling that entails caving all major points of disagreement with the opposing party in order to appear “credible” and “serious” on this issue.  We saw the defensive crouch most recently in the surrender on new FISA legislation, which a surprisingly large number of Democrats told themselves was a good “compromise,” and of course we saw it most completely in the authorization of the Iraq war and both the authorization and reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act.  Both for reasons of political positioning and genuine conviction, hawkish conservative (often Southern) Democrats and some, but not all, neoliberals took up positions that were deemed more pro-“defense” and pro-military, and they showed a greater willingness to use force overseas.  The Gulf War in ’91 was the great chastening of the Democratic politicians who did not go along with this new hawkishness, and those who did were rewarded with dominance in the party.  Overwhelming U.S. military superiority, a Democratic administration, and the re-emergence of humanitarian interventionism (spurred on in the wake of Rwanda) all combined to bring many progressives to support various deployments and small wars around the world.  An activist foreign policy became the attempted inoculation against the charge that Democrats were “weak” on defense and when it came to handling foreign threats.  The zenith of this hawkish liberalism, which was the same as the nadir of progressivism, came in the years 2001-03, and in spite of having rolled over for virtually every piece of antiterrorist legislation and for the Iraq war the Democratic leadership still found itself being painted with the same old colors.

Though it was not limited to them, Howard Dean and the netroots typified the disgusted Democratic reaction against the results of this.  Dean was an odd tribune of antiwar sentiment as a fairly conventional “centrist” Democrat, but when the main rivals in the Democratic primaries were all Senators who had voted for the war resolution he became the natural outlet for many frustrated progressive voters and donors.  However, as I mentioned earlier, Dean was still in favor of most interventions and was particularly outspoken in talking up the perceived threat from Iran.  Overcoming the “defensive crouch” with respect to Iraq seemed to require embracing equally or more hawkish positions on everything else, and so the fundamental Democratic Party posture remained one of cowering and shielding itself from the inevitable attacks that were going to come.  Obama has essentially been following in this same tradition: opposed to the war in Iraq, but otherwise in favor of a very active role in the world up to and including new military engagements and very keen to declare his support for military action in places other than Iraq by the U.S. and allied militaries.  So when progressives listen to Obama’s answers on foreign policy, they tend to cringe because they recognize perfectly well that Obama sounds just like the opposition on most issues related to U.S. policies abroad.  They complain that Obama is being too imitative and passive, but the very thing that makes them cringe is also what has made it possible for them to muster any significant political opposition to the Iraq war without falling into the GOP stereotype of the weak, naive Democrat.  If they were not cringing at Obama’s answers on Iran and Russia, they would still be stuck with the likes of Kerry defensively crouching and trying to prove that he was a better manager of an unjust war.  To more thoroughly antiwar and non-interventionist observers, Obama’s views are completely unacceptable, but it is important to understand that he is operating in a party that was as recently as four years in thrall to Iraq war supporters and the mentality that said that the war was necessary but just poorly-managed.

Steve Clemons is a very sharp guy, so I found his reactions to the debate tonight to be a little strange.  Let me clarify: I sympathize with a lot of his reactions, but I don’t know why a progressive realist thought he was going to hear things from Obama that would please him.  His frustration with Obama sounding like “McCain-lite” is understandable (even if this is nothing new about Obama), and I suppose I have shared this same frustration for over a year.  My fruitless crusade against the Obamacon delusion has been founded on the conviction that Obama’s foreign policy views are staggeringly conventional and in agreement with neoconservatism more than not.  Still, I sometimes wonder what his admirers among foreign policy thinkers expect him to say that causes them such displeasure when he restates positions he has held for months and years. 

One of the things that critics of Obama on the left seem to be complaining about tonight is how imitative of McCain on foreign policy he was, but what else was he going to do?  It’s not as if he was ever a contender for Dennis Kucinich voters, so why would he start talking like Kucinich?  Maybe it helps that I concluded that Obama was a hawkish interventionist a long time ago, so none of this disturbs me any longer.  It is what it is.  I have found the small consolation that he is at least a slightly more cautious hawkish interventionist, so that’s something.  Some of his progressive admirers still seem to bristle when he states positions on Iran, Russia or Palestine that he has more or less always held since entering the Senate. 

For instance, Clemons says:

It turns my stomach that Obama is defending Saakashvili.

Yes!  I have the same feeling whenever anyone defends Saakashvili, but that is what will happen when you insist on a MAP for Georgia and your running mate is chummy with old Misha.  Of course neither candidate will acknowledge that the Georgians escalated the conflict.  The establishment is foursquare behind NATO expansion, “democratic” solidarity and standing up to Putin, and perhaps no one more so than Obama’s running mate.  The electoral calculation behind this position seems to be that there are not enough ethnic Russian-Americans in this country who will take anti-Russian posturing ill, so there is basically no political downside to railing against Russian perfidy. 

Democrats probably have even less incentive to minimize their anti-Russianism because a lot of the ethnic Russians who are here, including immigrants and second- and third-generation Americans, seem to favor the Democrats anyway for a number of other reasons.   Yes, it is unfortunate that Obama felt compelled to back away from his original statement on Georgia that called for restraint on both sides, since restraint on both sides is necessary to end a conflict.  McCain wouldn’t know much about ending conflicts, though, since starting them is more his area of interest.  Even so, the candidate who backed the bombardment of Lebanon is someone who is either susceptible to pressure or already inclined to backing hawkish policies in many parts of the world.

Add Clemons to the small list of Obama supporters who thought McCain prevailed in the debate.  However, even here I think his high expectations for Obama (” I thought Obama would trounce McCain”) made Obama’s performance, which I think was far and away his best debate performance all year, seem worse than it was.  If there was anything wrong with Obama’s performance, it was that he holds foreign policy views that are so close to McCain’s on issue after issue that it will often sound to an audience as if Obama is always submitting to McCain’s will.  What really happened in the debate, though, was that Obama was gracious enough to acknowledge when he and McCain agreed and McCain was disrespectful and contemptuous throughout despite the remarkable convergence of their positions on the U.S. role overseas. 

Of course, that is imperative for McCain.  If he cannot scare the public into thinking that Obama is a lightweight McGovernite who loves dictators, he has absolutely nothing left to offer as an alternative.  Obama has already locked himself into a certain set of hawkish positions, and there is now little advantage in becoming less hawkish.  He has already changed enough positions for one year, and if there is one constant it is that Obama never changes his views to adopt a more anti-establishmentarian or marginal position.  As long as people keep perpetuating the idea, or the hope, that he is some kind of dove who represents some significantly different vision of America’s role in the world there will continue to be this shock and dismay when he restates the views he has held all along.  Meanwhile, it will be possible for McCain and his backers to frame Obama as copying and following McCain, when the unfortunate truth is that Obama came to many of these terrible positions all on his own long before the election season.

And the problem, John, with the strategy that’s been pursued was that, for 10 years, we coddled Musharraf, we alienated the Pakistani population, because we were anti-democratic. We had a 20th-century mindset that basically said, “Well, you know, he may be a dictator, but he’s our dictator.”

And as a consequence, we lost legitimacy in Pakistan. ~Barack Obama 

I — I don’t think that Senator Obama understands that there was a failed state in Pakistan when Musharraf came to power. Everybody who was around then, and had been there, and knew about it knew that it was a failed state. ~John McCain

The problem with throwing around the charge that your opponent doesn’t understand this or that is that it makes it that much more important for you to get things right.  What is more embarrassing than how willfully wrong McCain is here is how his partisans embrace his ignorance as proof of what Obama does not know.  Here’s Jonathan Last:

The knowledge gap is beginning to show and it gets worse when Obama mangles pre-Musharraf Pakistani history.

What pre-Musharraf Pakistani history?  The wording here got my attention, since I was fairly sure that there were no direct references to pre-Musharraf Pakistani history on either side.  Technically, Obama exaggerated Musharraf’s tenure slightly to a full ten years, when he came to power in 1999, but his basic analysis of popular attitudes in Pakistan, the largely wasted military aid and the reinforcing hostility to the U.S. and “Busharraf,” as his critics lovingly called him, is pretty accurate.  For the reasons I have outlined, McCain’s assessment of Pakistan as a “failed state” is, at best, very misleading, and his claim that “everybody” thought this is almost certainly false.  Of course, at the time Washington condemned the coup, which Musharraf had launched to prevent being fired from his post as army chief of staff.  Washington had imposed additional sanctions on Pakistan, which were then lifted in exchange for their assistance after 9/11.  As ramshackle as Pakistan under the Sharif government may have seemed and may have been, little that has plagued Pakistan in 1999 has been significantly changed under Musharraf’s rule.  To imply that Pakistan was a failed and is not now, as McCain did, is not correct.  It is either more of one now, or it has remained one throughout, but it is hard to get away from the conclusion that Musharraf has made things worse on our dime.  

Once Musharraf was in power, the “our SOB” rationale was explicit, but it was usually reframed in neo-Kemalist terms: he was an enlightened dictator opposing Islamic extremism, which seemed to make his arbitrary rule more palatable, and we bought this line for years while raising Pakistan to the status of a major non-NATO ally and accordingly selling them expensive military equipment.  Finally, popular discontent with Musharraf, both because of his perceived subservience to U.S. interests and his own domestic excesses, boiled over and finally led to his resignation this summer, whereupon he was soon replaced by the widower of Bhutto whose name McCain can’t remember.  The man whose name McCain can’t remember was apparently one of the intended targets of the Islamabad Marriott bombing (he was scheduled to attend the iftar that evening), and he was the one who was recently drooling at the sight of Sarah Palin in New York, but McCain couldn’t even get his name right…and Obama was supposed to have mangled things related to Pakistan? 

When I see people, such as Yepsen, declaring that McCain got the better of the substantive side of the debate, I want to scream, because no one who knows anything about Pakistan could have come away from the exchanges tonight under the impression that McCain knew much of anything.

Update: One other thought on this.  For the sake of argument, assume that McCain was right that Pakistan was a failed state–are military dictatorships McCain’s idea of an appropriate solution to failing states?  If so, why does he continue to support the Maliki and Karzai governments and the broader “freedom agenda”?  But we’re probably going to be treated to windy pronouncements that McCain once again showed his mastery of the subject, which I suppose is all the greater an achievement when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

There seems to be an idea that name-checking Ukrainian politicians and Sevastopol, as McCain did, counts for something.  As Jim Geraghty says:

It’s a very, very different feeling than having George W. Bush at the top of the ticket.

Well, it’s hard to argue with feelings, but it seems to me that McCain was citing those details in an attempt to demonstrate expertise but ended up seeming like the candidate who felt obliged to rattle off a bunch of names to prove that he knows something about the subject, as if he was concerned that someone might think that he doesn’t.  Presumably, journalists already give him the benefit of the doubt when he talks about these matters, but as I heard it there was some similarity to the second presidential debate in 2000, so memorably spoofed by SNL, in which Bush dropped foreign names to show that he was not the clueless lightweight that a lot of people thought him to be.  In fact, that debate and the spoof of it resembled tonight’s agreement-fest more than a little. 

The break-up of the Ukrainian coalition government is not as obscure as talking about forgiving African debt, so in that sense McCain should get less credit for knowing what anyone who reads the news already knew, but what might bear closer examination is whether Bush’s old debate answers on foreign policy are substantially better or worse than McCain’s.  (Bonus quote from then-Candidate Bush: “There’s much more to life than the Dow Jones Industrial Average”–Republicans had better hope that people still believe that!)

And McCain forced Obama to debate Russia, Iran, and post-2007 Iraq almost entirely on Republican terms, something that would have been unthinkable as recently as the last election. ~James Antle

I’m not sure why he says this.  First of all, McCain didn’t force Obama to do anything.  Obama has been quite happy to accommodate himself to the Washington consensus on Russia, Iran and post-2007 Iraq without McCain’s help.  More’s the pity, in my view, but Obama reached these positions months or even years ago.   There is and was no meaningful difference between establishment Republican and Democratic views on Russia or Iran and in 2004 the Iraq debate was even more on Republican terms than it is this time.  Kerry was attempting to cast himself as the more credible candidate to conclude the war in Iraq successfully, but the notion of withdrawal was not even part of the debate.  Back in 2004, the great antiwar Obama was insisting on the importance of stabilizing Iraq, so to the extent that Obama held his ground at all on Iraq is an impressive statement of how far public attitudes and the Democratic Party have shifted.  Since Kerry’s defeat, antiwar Democrats have become much more forthright and influential with their own party, perceiving in Kerry’s lame “reporting for duty” me-tooism the cause of Bush’s re-election.  On Russia, ever since the end of the Cold War Democrats have traditionally been more meddlesome and obnoxious concerning NATO expansion, Balkan interventions, Kosovo and the Caucasus.  McCain has managed to outstrip them in his hostility to Russia, but even this is a fairly recent development.  KLA thug Hacim Thaci was a guest at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 (which may have helped to push Serbs to vote for Bush and allowed him to win Ohio); Richard Holbrooke continues to be taken seriously for some reason; Biden has been at the forefront of every expansion of NATO since 1996 and seems to love Saakashvili almost as much as McCain does.  If there is a Democratic alternative view on Russia and policy in the Balkans and Caucasus, I would be interested to know what it is. 

On Iran, even Howard Deanmade more belligerent noises about the Iranian nuclear program in 2004, and it has become a minor Democratic hawk talking point that the administration attacked the wrong country when it invaded Iraq.  Obama has felt compelled to take a hard line against Iran throughout the campaign.  The debate over meeting with leaders of “rogue” states is something of a distraction, since there is no disagreement about ends.  In all of these things, McCain offers the impatient, intemperate expression of the same policies that Obama presents with a calm and cool demeanor.  One might argue that Obama makes these dangerous policies more palatable by making them seem more sane, but equally one might argue that what has been happening over the last four or eight years is simply the convergence of both parties as they both move toward terrible policies all over the world.