Back to the future

"We were elected to change Washington and we let Washington change us.... We lost the trust of the American people...... we lost their trust..... we lost that trust..... We are going to change that..... We are going to get back to basics..... We must catch up to history"— John McCain accepting the nomination of the Republican Party.

And my question is: Shouldn't he have done all that before he started to run? It sounded less like a set of policy proposals than a promise to get a set of policy proposals together sometime in the next two months. After four days I still have very little idea of what he wants to do. Cut back on pork barrel spending and earmarks; help children with special needs and small business owners. Drill. It seemed to be all about going back, recapturing something lost, disavowing what had befallen his party. This was admirably honest, but there was a touch of elegy to the whole thing. It reminded me of that moment in the debates when Hillary started sounding wistful and every thought she was conceding. McCain's gentleness has never come across better, I thought; it made me believe again that he is a decent man; and the courtesy he showed Obama was long overdue. But my God was it boring. People are going to vote for Obama just so they don't have to sit through a speech like that ever again.

Preaching to the choir

A big zero in terms of policy proposals, a lot of sarcasm, a lot of misstatements, and a few strategic errors, such as mocking miranda rights and community organizers: Obama was helping out-of-work steel workers, who probably won't appreciate the sarcasm. Expect him to hit back hard on that. She's shown what force-level she's comfortable with. She's also shown she's willing to risk opinions on foreign policy: game on for Biden. My overrall impression was that Palin was speaking only to the base. Few independents or Clinton fans will be tempted by what they saw last night. McCain is tacking hard to the right: this election will be won in the centre.

The Samesfacts.com has a selection of some of the more egregious factual errors:—

• PALIN: “Listening to him speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform — not even in the state senate.”

REALITY: He co-authored the Lugar-Obama bill on nuclear nonproliferation, working across the aisle to pass legislation that intercepted illegal shipments of weapons of mass destruction and helped destroy conventional weapons stockpiles. He also passed sweeping ethics reform in both the Illinois and US senates, leading on two big contentious measures: racial profiling by police and requiring recordings of interrogations in potential death penalty cases. At last count, he sponsored 820 laws in Illinois, authored 152 bills and co-sponsored 427 laws in Washington.

• PALIN: “Victory in Iraq is finally in sight… he wants to forfeit.”

REALITY: McCain is alone in wanting to continue the war in Iraq indefinitely. Both Obama, Bush and Malaki are in agreement on a timetable for withdrawal. Bush is now following Obama's plan in Pakistan as well.

• PALIN: “Terrorist states are seeking new-clear weapons without delay… he wants to meet them without preconditions.”

REALITY: Again, McCain is alone on this. Republicans agree with direct talks with Iran. And for the record, there are no such things as "terrorist states". Terrorists are by definition stateless.

• PALIN: “Taxes are too high… he wants to raise them... [increasing] the tax burden on the American people by hundreds of billions of dollars.”

REALITY: Almost every observer agrees that the Obama tax plan will provide a bigger break for middle class families than McCain's. The Tax Policy Center, a think tank run jointly by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, concluded that Obama's plan would increase after-tax income for middle-income taxpayers by about 5 percent by 2012, or nearly $2,200 annually. McCain's plan, which cuts taxes across all income levels, would raise after tax-income for middle-income taxpayers by 3 percent, the center concluded. But Obama would provide $80 billion in tax breaks, mainly for poor workers and the elderly, including tripling the Earned Income Tax Credit for minimum-wage workers and higher credits for larger families.

• PALIN: "America needs more energy... our opponent is against producing it."

REALITY: A flat out lie. Turn it through 18o degrees and it begins to get near the truth: Obama plans to develop many more energy sources than McCain, who has skipped the last eight votes on renewable energy. She's talking about oil.

• PALIN: "I have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending ... and championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress 'thanks but no thanks' for that Bridge to Nowhere."

THE REALITY: As mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million. In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation. She in fact supported the "bridge to nowhere" until it was ridiculed. Then she was against it.

Peggy Noonan: "Its over"

Picked up by a MSNBC microphone today, Peggy Noonan talking to GOP consultant Mike Murphy and Chuck Todd.

MURPHY: "I come out of a blue swing-state governor world. Angler. Whitman. Tommy Thompson. Mitt Romney. Jeb Bush. And I mean, and these guys, this is all like how you win a Texas race, just run it up. And, It's not going to work."

NOONAN: "It's over."

TODD: "Is she really the most qualified woman?"

NOONAN: "Most qualified? No. I think they went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives.... Every time Republicans do this, because that's not where they live, and that's not what they're good at, they blow it."

MURPHY: "You know what's really the worst thing about it? The greatness of McCain is 'no cynicism' and this is cynical."

TODD: "And as you called it: 'gimmicky'."

The fizz in the drink

“To be Leo! To have a huge role like that! To play the role that is the fizz in the drink, you know what I mean? You are the movie! I wish I could play the lead role in one movie, one great movie.” — Alec Baldwin, in this week's New Yorker.

He's in luck. I wrote the lead in my new novel, In The Rooms, with him very much in mind (for the full imaginary cast, see above). I wouldn't mention it, fearing retribution from whichever God it is who punishes hubris, but only three people read this blog, so who cares.

Daydream believer

"If your mind didn't wander, then you'd be largely shackled to whatever you are doing right now," says Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California. "But instead you can engage in mental time travel and other kinds of simulation. During a daydream, your thoughts are really unbounded."

According to Schooler there are two types of daydreamer. The first doesn't notice they are day dreaming, the second does. Its this second type that tend to have break through ideas. "The point is that it's not enough to just daydream," he says. "Letting your mind drift off is the easy part. The hard part is maintaining enough awareness so that even when you start to daydream you can interrupt yourself and notice a creative insight."

He cites the example of Minnesotan engineer Arthur Fry who, in 1974, was sat in church, pondering how to insert scraps of paper into his choir book, so that he could quickly find the right hymns during the service. Instead of listening to the sermon, he let his mind wander. "It was during the sermon," he said "that I first thought, 'What I really need is a little bookmark that will stick to the paper but will not tear the paper when I remove it.' " And so was born the Post-It Note.

McCain goes to war

The McCain camp has just pulled an interview with CNN after the above segment was aired, in which Campbell Brown asks one too many questions about Sarah Palin's credentials to be commander in chief. The questions were wholly legitimate, the answers wholly obfuscatory. The McCain camp need to forget about Obama. Say mcCain wins. The question remains: what are Palin's credentials to be commander-in-chief? According to Frank Gaffney:

"Speaking of geography, Alaskan territory is also along the trajectory of ballistic missiles launched eastward out of Stalinist North Korea. For that reason, among others, Alaska's Fort Greely was selected as the site for the principal U.S. ground-based defense against such missiles. As that state's governor, Sarah Palin would know more by osmosis – if nothing else – about the necessity for U.S. anti-missile systems than either Messrs. Obama or Biden."

Osmosis. Really.

The Sound of the Crowd

"His style is called professorial, though in their wildest dreams professors never find themselves addressing cheering throngs. He is also accused of populism, perhaps because he seems to feel that government of the people should also be government by the people and for the people. It is sentiment of this kind the wise of the political world tend to dismiss as lofty, as starry-eyed. And he is accused of presenting himself as a messiah. This charge is arrived at by reasoning backward from the fact of those crowds... Democracy in contemporary America can be enacted only on a giant scale. The calculations that lie behind cant phrases and broad gestures are no doubt unavoidable. But the core of it all is the candidate and the crowd." — Marilynne Robinson, The New York Times

80,000 people gathered to listen to Obama's nomination speech. I watched it on TV, along with the other 38 million — more than the Oscars, the Olympics — and couldn't wait for the cameras to pan back over that crowd. It's all I wanted to watch. I've never seen so many Americans in one place. Every speaker that came in front of it, even the old pros like Gore, looked slightly overwhelmed. The size of it brought its own peculiar dynamics: laughter didn't really register except as a sort of distant rustle. And there was none of that pantomime booing that bedevils political speeches. Which left only the cheering: slow to build, slower to dispel, starting in one part of the crowd, then going on a lap of the stadium, by which time it had transformed into the kind of roar familiar only to sports fans. People can caricature the Obama crowds all they like, but they are mistaken to think it dewy-eyed or devotional, for what lies behind those cheers — what brings 80,000 people out of their homes — is anger. The best kind of anger, transformed en masse into something altogether more uplifting, but anger nonetheless.