Afghanistan, again...

Well, I sure was wrong about Hillary!

My mistakes include a couple of retrospectively dumb assumptions: first, that a reasonably intelligent person who remembers Vietnam would not want to repeat it; and, second, that since Hillary's chance of ever being President is down in the low single digits now, she no longer feels obliged to be so goddamned butch.

Silly me. It's not as if I never heard of cognitive dissonance theory — it's just that I wanted to think better of her than she deserves. Look back at my pre-election posts, and you can explain it with cognitive dissonance theory.

So, now, the rational elements of the Democratic party find themselves wondering if lining up behind a majority of their constituents and doing the right thing in Afghanistan remains rational if it means lining up behind Joe Biden. Joe Biden is not nearly as butch as Hillary. Joe Biden, unlike his boss, is not terribly adept at working the press. Joe Biden is just... he's just right.

...

Meanwhile, here on Long Island — and, to be sure, everywhere else in the United States — our public schools and suburban neighborhoods are being flooded with cheap, high quality heroin. For some odd reason or another, nobody in the mainstream press seems to be relating that to the vast increase in opium production in Afghanistan in recent years. Maybe I'm wrong, but it just kind of seems like the two might be related.

Some who are familiar with my solution to both the Afghanistan problem and the heroine problem — going directly to the warlords and outbidding all competitors for the raw opium — seem to think it's just my characteristic cynicism in action. Okay, I am characteristically cynical — but this idea can work.

So, over the weekend, I'll send out another batch of fax messages to various Persons in Power, for all the good that will do. Mostly, though, I'll hope that somebody that somebody in power actually might listen to came up with the same idea — and that somebody in power actually listens.

"Aw, shucks!"

I wasn't planning to say anything at all about the vice-presidential debate, but I have to congratulate Senator Joseph Biden on his remarkable self-control. Had it been me up there, there is no way I could have stopped myself from rolling my eyes.

Gosh darn it.

Wal-Mart Women

The term "Wal-Mart Women" hit the airwaves on the PBS News Hour last Friday, September 5. It somehow escaped the lips of Republican pollster Linda Divall.

LINDA DIVALL: We did a dial test and breakout sessions in suburban Milwaukee with swing voters, with Wal-Mart women and with younger voters...

JUDY WOODRUFF: Now, what do you mean by "Wal-Mart women"?

(Linda Divall got that "Uh oh, now I've done it" look on her face. You could see that her mind was racing, trying to find a delicate way to explain a very indelicate phrase.)

LINDA DIVALL: We mean women who are -- as Anna just said -- are very concerned about the economy, women who are economically distressed, whose disposable income has declined rather substantially.

Neither Judy Woodruff nor Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg took her to task for what struck me as a blatantly patronizing expression, apparently already in widespread use within the McCain campaign. Now I'm hearing it all over the broadcast media, sometimes shortened to "Wal-Mart moms," but nobody seems to be giving the GOP the credit it deserves for the coinage.

I couldn't take my eyes off the reaction shots of the delegates as I watched the Republican convention. Clearly, there weren't any "Wal-Mart women" there. There were Norstrom women, Nieman-Marcus women, Lord & Taylor women -- but not a Wal-Mart woman to be seen. At the Republican convention, a Wal-Mart woman would have been viewed as a lower species -- somebody who really should have been in uniform, collecting the used coffee cups and sweeping up the confetti.

Sarah Palin, of course, is supposed to appeal to those "Wal-Mart women." She's just a regular gal, somebody you might find checking out the tabloids on the supermarket checkout line, or cheering on the kids at the local church sponsored wolf massacre. Is it any surprise she didn't look too comfortable during her interview with Charlie Gibson of ABC?

Look at her posture, closed off and defensive, legs crossed, hands clasped. Perhaps a defensive stance was called for, because Gibson didn't throw her many softballs. He treated her with all the respect a vice-presidential candidate deserves -- that is to say, the assumption that she would know how to answer substantive questions.

A group of McCain's top aides had exhaustively prepped her in the days between the convention and her first interview, and she had her talking points down pat. Her problem was that she hadn't been prepared with a talking point for every situation in a one-on-one interview. In a one-on-one, the interviewer can ask as many follow-up questions as he likes in an effort to get an answer that's not a talking point -- and that's exactly what Gibson did.

She didn't do badly, exactly, but she didn't do especially well either. Perhaps she needed more talking points, because she seemed to repeat herself, in exactly the same words, over and over. Some think it was unfair of Gibson to ask her about the Bush Doctrine without telling her just what that doctrine is, but even after he told her, her answer left much to be desired. I guess the McCain aides neglected to drill her on that one.

I wonder how much better prepared this ambassador to the Wal-Mart moms will be when it's time for the vice-presidential debate. Clearly, whatever she's learned by then, Joe Biden will know a lot more -- but demonstrating knowledge is not what the debates are about, as we've observed over the years. Can Biden be more likeable than Palin? We'll see.

Fannie, Freddie, and (incidentally) the election

Yes, the conservatorship of Fannie and Freddie was necessary. The only entity in the world that owes more money than Fannie and Freddie combined is -- as you can easily guess -- the government of the United States of America. If Fannie and Freddie defaulted on their debts, it would cause worldwide economic meltdown as credit dried up completely.

The vast majority of Americans have no clue what the crisis is all about, and explaining it to them is next to impossible. Most people are economic illiterates. Use words like "securitization" or "derivative" and watch their eyes glaze over.

Barack Obama and Joseph Biden understand what's happening at Fannie and Freddie. John McCain and Sarah Palin do not. The unfortunate outcome is that McCain and Palin find it much easier to talk to America about Fannie and Freddie than Obama and Biden do. The Republican candidates can spout sound bites that really have no bearing on the severity of the problem, while the Democrats seem to feel obliged to say things that make economic sense -- and then watch the eyes glaze over.

Please! Can't some speechwriter compose a few populist sounding platitudes for them to produce when the cameras are running? How about, "When we reorganize Fannie and Freddie, we'll make sure that taxpayer money is safe again, and not being used to bail out rich investors and overpaid executives; we'll make sure that middle-class families can realize the dream of home ownership without fear of finding themselves out on the streets; and we'll end the irresponsible Republican policies that caused the mess we're in today."

Okay, that's just a statement of goals -- not even policy, much less a plan for policy implementation. So what. The hard stuff can go into the interviews by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal -- it doesn't have to be on the evening news.

Speaking of the hard stuff -- the take-over of Fannie and Freddie got me to thinking, again, about those not-too-serious ideas I was playing with last month for putting real pressure on Russia. Well, this time, I might be just a little more serious.

One of the biggest problems with Fannie and Freddie is their enormous size -- too large to fail. The obvious solution to that problem is to split the monsters into a number of smaller companies, similar to the way AT&T was split into the "Baby Bells" back in the 1980s. The problem with that solution, though, is figuring out how to divide the immense debt Fannie and Freddie have incurred.

Well, here's my "little idea." Just as AT&T was divided regionally, why not divide the mortgage giants' debts regionally? One large company might inherit all the debt owed to China; another could inherit all the debt owed to investors in the European Union. Debts owed to Russia's sovereign wealth fund and other Russian investors could be assigned to yet another company; perhaps the debts owed to the various sovereign wealth funds of the Persian Gulf area could be grouped together, and assigned to yet another spin-off.

I'm sure that there are quite a few economists and bankers with the appropriate qualifications (including sense of humor) to enjoy slotting Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, and all the others into amusing and entertaining categories that might make sense. As for American investors, I'd hope that the pension funds might be kept separate from the hedge funds, and that taxpayer bailout money be reserved for the former.

Make sense?

Well, let's see. Although we couldn't keep the debts incurred by the various companies sorted so neatly, initially, at least, the sorting could be useful -- especially when all of them are depending on a government safety net to keep them solvent. Unlike Fannie and Freddie, though, none of the new companies would be "too big to fail." If some foreign country were being especially uncooperative, the Fannie/Freddie successor company that owed that country's sovereign wealth fund a ton of money just might find widening holes in its safety net.

Okay, it's just a "little idea," and probably not feasible. Just the same, the greatest debtor in the history of the world ought to be able to find some way to leverage that great distinction for its own good.