I caught the speech on the gym this morning and wanted to jot down some thoughts before exposing myself to too much RSS and listserves that contaminate me with other people’s ideas. For one thing, the underlying idea of this speech seems a bit odd. It’s hard to know how to even characterize what it was.

But the execution first and foremost reminded me of why Obama has always been the writers’ candidate in American politics. This is a guy who’s not afraid to try to express complicated or difficult ideas. He wasn’t afraid to do it in Dreams From My Father and now that he’s long past writing his own material as a solo act, his whole team is clearly imbued with the same spirit and that same mandate to try to really explain the complicated and difficult ideas rather than sweep them under the rug.

This seems connected to me to the remarkable way in which this speech is being pushed out in multiple media—on television, but also on Twitter and on Facebook and via SMS and all in multiple languages—to a global audience. Part of the rise of Obama is the rise of a post-television, post-sound bite technological paradigm. You can deliver a speech at 7 AM Eastern Time and know that even though relatively few Americans will be up to see it, anyone who’s interested will be able to Google up a transcript. And if people like the speech, it’ll become a YouTube classic. It creates a whole new world from one in which the point of a speech is just to field test a couple of zingers in hopes that one or two of them gets picked up for the evening news.

I thought Barack Obama delivered a great speech tonight. It’s only weak spot was this little ditty on his administration’s approach to the banking system:

[W]e will act with the full force of the federal government to ensure that the major banks that Americans depend on have enough confidence and enough money to lend even in more difficult times. And when we learn that a major bank has serious problems, we will hold accountable those responsible, force the necessary adjustments, provide the support to clean up their balance sheets, and assure the continuity of a strong, viable institution that can serve our people and our economy.

I would be hard-pressed to say what that means. And yet the other part of the speech about the banks—the part about how rescuing the financial system isn’t about rescuing bankers its about rescuing the entire American economy—was spot-on. The idea of the stimulus is to close the gap between what we are producing and what we could be producing. But without a well-functioning banking system, it’ll be difficult-to-impossible for the economy to ever get off life support. Businesses with opportunities to expand need to be able to get loans. Obama’s plan for the economy is a three-legged stool—stimulus, housing, banking—but the banking leg is the most important one and it’s also the one on which the administration has been least convincing. I saw a poll showing that 80+ percent of the public feels more optimistic after Obama’s speech. I’ll feel more optimistic when I see a convincing plan for the financial sector.

Ezra Klein reports that senior administration officials are telling him their budget will assume the existence of a “mandate” as part of a health care reform package. Since nobody except the voters ever agreed with Obama about this, it’s being greeted with all around cheer. But I still think Obama was right in the first place. It’s not that a mandate is such a terrible thing, but it’s primary purpose is to keep insurance companies in business once progressive stuff like community rating and guaranteed issue policies are put in place. If I were in congress, I’d write a bill that has community rating and guaranteed issue. Let the insurance companies fight for the mandate! Make them deliver some votes for a “compromise” featuring all three. But there’s no particular reason that this favor to insurance firms should be defined as constitutive of the progressive health care agenda.

But whatever; this debate was never especially important.

1. Obama wants the 2013 deficit to be half the size of the 2009 deficit he inhereted.
2. The 2010 deficit is going to be large.
3. Specifically, we’ll go from $1.2 trillion in 2009 to $1.5 trillion in 2010 to $533 billion in 2013.
4. Spending cuts are expected to come from the expiration of stimulus money, from a reduction in “emergency” appropriations for Iraq and Afghanistan, from reductions in Medicare Advantage giveaways to private insurance firms, and I believe from some other form of medical efficiencies.
5. Revenue enhancements are projected to come from the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, from ending the hedge fund manager’s loophole, and from carbon auction permits.
6. Overall, the idea is to get back down to a deficit of about 3 percent of GDP, but to have a better health care system when we do it.

I assume more and more info on this will become available in the next few days.

For Barack Obama to go on Arabic language television to directly address the emerging Arab public sphere. America’s image problem in that problematic region needs to be tackled in two kinds of ways. On the one hand, there’s a need for substantive shifts in policy that narrow the gap between U.S. and Arab perspectives on what’s happening in the world and what the problems are. And then on the other hand, I think there’s a need for gestures that set a context of mutual respect in which disagreements about policy are seen as disagreements about policy rather than reflecting a deeper religio-cultural chasm.

This is mostly about the latter, and I think you see it succeeding to an extent in the tone of al-Arabiya’s writeup of what Obama said about Israel—it’s critical, but it doesn’t dominate the discussion and disagreement isn’t taken as vitiating everything else he says. That’s important. The rest, of course, comes down to policy. Closing Gitmo and moving to really bring an end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq should do a lot on that front.

I was watching West Wing re-runs over the weekend and it’s an interesting thought experiment in the “what if Bill Clinton had been more left-wing?” hypothetical. It makes a big difference in some areas, including judicial nominees and Israel-Palestine diplomacy, but on core domestic policy issues there was no plausible script to write in which Bartlett being a big lib led the congressional GOP to suddenly surrender on expansive new social spending.

As several friends of mine can verify, Saturday night I was expressing some skepticism about the idea that seventy-gillion people were really all going to schlep down to DC to stand outside in January amidst a giant crowd. Among other things, the crowd estimate sizes seemed to have been pulled out of thin air. Now I read:

Officials are casting doubt on an early projection that 4 million to 5 million people could jam downtown Washington on Inauguration Day, saying it is more likely that the crowd will be about half that size.

D.C. authorities said the earlier estimates, provided by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), were based on speculation surrounding the historic nature of the swearing-in of Barack Obama as the nation’s first African American president. After weeks of checking with charter bus companies, airlines and other sources, they’re reassessing.

Duly noted. What’s more, let me say that despite widespread rumors of people reaping windfalls by renting out their houses for Inauguration Week, I have yet to encounter real hard evidence of any such thing happening.

This strong me as odd. The people making the accusations kept acknowledging that they had no evidence. One might think that communicating to television personalities the fact that there was no evidence of wrongdoing on Obama’s part would constitute a good PR strategy. Given that they knew there was no evidence of wrongdoing, they should have ceased implying that there was wrongdoing. But they didn’t do that at all. Not, I would submit, because of any failings on Obama’s part, but because Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, John Heileman, Mark Halperin, and Pat Buchanan don’t care at all about the accuracy of the impression their coverage gives.

Eventually, they got around to the idea that Obama hadn’t criticized Blagojevich in sufficiently harsh terms and that the reason for this was that Blagojevich has unrelated dirt on Obama and/or Rahm Emmannuel. Several of them deemed that likely, though none of them had any evidence for this proposition.

Sweet, sweet liberal MSNBC.

Barack Obama will, of course, be the nation’s first serious NBA fan in the White House. And it seems that Michael Crowley has the real truth about his alleged “team of rivals” — it’s actually a team of ballers:

Jones played forward at Georgetown. Geithner reportedly likes himself a good pickup game. And the Times says Eric Holder was once known, impressively, for his "easy dunk." (Cracks EC: "Not even Janet Reno could do that."

Update: Susan Rice, too! (Sez Ben).

That’s the crux of the matter, but make sure you click through for a solid Stephon Marbury joke. And it seems Janet Napolitano has done some coaching.

A hoops-oriented administration could really redraw the diplomatic map. Traditional US allies like Britain and German aren’t big on basketball. But Spain, whose relations with the United States have been strained ever since Zapatero withdrew Spanish forces from Iraq, has probably the world’s second-best league. And of course rival great powers like Russia and China and important basketball forces. And our entire policy toward Latin America could be reoriented around a partnership with Argentina.

Elizabeth Drew has an interesting piece on “The Truth About the Election” but I wanted to comment on this one point:

Obama has spoken a great deal about seeking bipartisanship, but how much this is attainable is yet to be known. The Republican ranks on Capitol Hill will have shrunk as a result of the election, and will be more dominated by the right. Few moderate Republicans in the Senate—Maine Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe among them—remain. In the House, there are only seventeen Republicans from the eastern states between Maryland and Maine, and none from New England. Obama seeks to set a new tone in Washington, but House Republican leaders, and those jockeying for leadership positions, like Eric Cantor (Virginia) and Dan Lungren (California), are playing to their conservative base and are sounding as partisan as ever—if not more so. They appear disinclined to give the new President any cooperation, shortsighted though that may be for their party.

The thing of it is that it doesn’t really matter what Eric Cantor thinks. The House Republicans are, in effect, irrelevant. The House GOP mattered in the 110th Congress because President Bush used his agenda-setting powers to frame a certain number of issues such that Blue Dogs agreed with the Republicans. In the 111th Congress, you’ll have more liberals (making Blue Dog votes less necessary) plus more Blue Dogs (reducing the proportion of the Blue Dog faction you need to get all the Blue Dog votes you need) and a Democratic president who presumably won’t deliberately shift the agenda to terrain that lets the Republicans get the upper hand.

What matters is the Senate. And I would suggest that what matters here is less the number of moderates than the number of people representing states Obama won. Namely — Senators Collins, Snowe, Spectre, Voinovich, Lugar, Grassley, Burr, Martinez, Ensign, and possibly Coleman. Obama will have a strong argument to make that the voters of those states would like to see congress cooperate with the Obama agenda, and he has the organizational tools at his disposal to ensure that voters who feel that way are able to express their feelings to their senators.

Barack Obama — our first Mac-using president? Incidentally, it seems to me that it would be very good policy for the federal government to use Linux for all its basic office computers. I should probably offer a fully-formed argument for that proposition but instead let’s hope some Linux fan reads this and leaves one in comments.

Washington Post asks various eminences to offer some thoughts about what Barack Obama’s top priorities ought to be. I think it’s disappointing that the answers tend to be so unresponsive to actual events in the world. My personal interests are similar to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s and I greatly admire his way of thinking about foreign policy issues. So eighteen months ago, I would have given an answer quite similar to the one he gives.

But I think it’s clear enough that the combination of a calmer situation in Iraq with the dawn of a crisis in the global financial system and the arrival of a worldwide recession has made diplomatic engagement with Iran considerably less pressing today than it was eighteen months ago. I still think the basic strategy he lays out is a good one, and something an Obama administration ought to pursue, but it’s just not the case that this is as pressing as it was a little while back.

Somewhat similarly, something I’ve been wrestling with lately is the fact that I’m not, personally, someone who’s normally taken a huge interest in environmental topics. And it’s still the case that on the domestic front there are a few topics that are closer to my heart. At the same time, there’s an objective urgency about climate where it makes a big, big, big difference whether we do something in 2009 rather than 2019 that doesn’t exist in the same ways for some other topics. There are a lot of policy areas where “things could be better” and even where quick reform would make a big difference. But responsible leadership needs to tackle topics with an eye on the extent to which they’re actually pressing emergencies rather than just festering sources of injustice.

White people are faced with either a negro or a total nutter who happens to have a pale face. Personally I’d prefer the negro. National Socialists are not mindless haters. Here, I see a white man, who is almost dead, who declares he wants to fight endless wars around the globe to make the world safe for Judeo-capitalist exploitation, who supports the invasion of America by illegals–basically a continuation of the last eight years of Emperor Bush. Then, we have a black man, who loves his own kind, belongs to a Black-Nationalist religion, is married to a black women–when usually negroes who have ‘made it’ immediately land a white spouse as a kind of prize–that’s the kind of negro that I can respect. Any time that a prominent person embraces their racial heritage in a positive manner, it’s good for all racially minded folks. Besides, America cares nothing for the interests of the white American worker, while having a love affair with just about every non-white on planet Earth. It’d be poetic justice to have a non-white as titular chief over this decaying modern Sodom and Gomorrah.

Food for thought.

Ethan Porter has an interesting piece on “Why the Jews finally came home to Obama.”

When thinking about this kind of issue, though, it’s worth recalling that what normally happens in elections is that people vote the way they normally vote. Nobody’s surprised to see Barack Obama getting a huge share of the black vote, and Bill Clinton was always wildly popular in the African-American community, but of course black voters also overwhelmingly pulled the lever for John Kerry. But at one point in the spring and summer of 2004, it was thought that Kerry might have trouble motivating black voters for various reasons. That’s not to say that the worrying was useless or unnecessary, but it is to say that research shows that the main thing that campaigns do is “remind” partisans of the reasons that they’re partisans and bring them around to voting for the party that they always vote for. Thus, when we started this general election cycle there were certain traditional Democratic demographic groups (Jews, Hispanics) that seemed skeptical of Obama, while McCain was a widely popular “maverick” views skeptically by conservatives. But over the course of the campaign, Jews and Hispanics came to like Obama, conservatives came to like McCain, and both candidates saw their cross-partisan appeal fade. Campaigns are important because if you didn’t actually do the campaigning this stuff might not happen and then you’d be in a world of pain. But it shouldn’t come as shocking to anyone that a presidential campaign was able to bring its party’s traditional voters along.

Our spending plans have been stretched by John McCain’s negative attacks and the overwhelming resources of the Republican National Committee.

As of October 15th, John McCain and the RNC together had nearly $20 million more in cash than the combined total of Obama for America and the DNC. And just this week, we’re facing new and unexpected spending against us in Montana and West Virginia.

There’s some impressive illogic in that last sentence. McCain being forced to play defense in Montana and West Virgina is spun as an unexpected problem for the poor, cash-strapped Obama campaign. It’s clever.

Barack Obama has a stated Middle East policy. He also has a set of foreign policy advisers. And beyond the relatively narrow group of people who’ve been Obama’s national security team from the beginning he, as the Democratic nominee, now draws on the advice of the wider circle of Democrat-aligned foreign policy hands. This is a group of more-or-less known quantities whose views are by no means uniform, but which fall in a fairly predictable range. One might think the best way to ascertain Obama’s likely approach to national security policy would be to think about these people and their views. The institutions where Obama’s advisers will be coming from — CAP, CNAS, NSN, CSIS — have all kinds of written documents about foreign policy issues that could be perused.

Or you could follow Stanley Kurtz and focus on the views of Rashid Khalidi a scholar and left-wing Arab nationalist who, according to Kurtz, was a supporter of Obama’s when Obama was a local politician in Khalidi’s neighborhood.

It seems tedious to even point this out, but the standard of proof being applied here couldn’t possibly be applied consistently. Consider, by contrast, Obama’s ties to Joe Biden. They’re both Senators and, indeed, if Obama becomes President then Joe Biden will become Vice President. Or Obama’s ties to General Colin Powell — Obama specifically sought and received his support for a presidential bid and has repeatedly suggested that he would be interested in getting input from General Powell on national security issues. Or Obama’s ties to New Republic editor Marty Peretz who has written positive things about Obama. But then again, so has Jeffrey Goldberg. And so has Spencer Ackerman. But those guys think different things about American policy to the Middle East.

Or consider John McCain. He’s been in politics a long time. And his views have changed over the years. And he’s had a lot of different kinds of political allies. Back when he was leading the charge for the McCain-Feingold bill, he worked closely with the heads of a lot of liberal good-government groups. Should we take that to mean that he agrees with the heads of those groups about abortion rights or foreign policy? His “ties” to them are much more substantial than anything between Obama and Khalidi.

The procedure just doesn’t make sense. Meanwhile, National Review doesn’t agree with the foreign policy views of the sort of mainstream Democrats who, unlike Khalidi, will actually wind up staffing an Obama administration and making policy in it. Wouldn’t it make more sense to expend time and energy attacking those people and their views? Conservatives aren’t going to like the real Obama, so they’d do well to focus a little bit on him instead of obsessively hounding this mythical figure they’ve created.

Okay, I just actually watched the Powell endorsement on my Tivo, and I think it’s a more devastating blow to John McCain than I initially would have thought. Of course this won’t move real liberals, who don’t like Powell much and are already committed to Obama anyway. Nor will it move conservatives, who don’t like Powell either. But there are people out there — lots of people — who, just like Powell, voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and then again in 2004 even though maybe Bush was a bit too conservative for their tastes. Now those people maybe regret having done so and see that Bush was a disastrous president. But at the same time, the Democratic Party seems to have shifted left, and nominated a relatively green figure, while the GOP nominated someone who has a reputation for moderation.

And now here’s Powell, probably the only Republican moderate with a meaningful national profile, speaking in detail about problems with McCain, about the process of growing disillusioned with McCain, and vouching for Obama’s readiness to lead and fitness for office. In a lot of respects guys like Jim Leach and Wayne Gilchrest have, on the merits, been better messengers for this kind of message. But nobody knows who Leach and Gilchrest are, whereas everybody knows who Powell is. It’s a signal to every right-of-center person who maybe thinks the GOP has gotten too right-of-center that Obama’s okay. Meanwhile, it’s a reassuring reminder of what kind of people Obama does, in reality, pal around with. Powell was National Security Adviser under Ronald Reagan. He was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs under George H.W. Bush. And he was Secretary of State under George W. Bush. Those probably aren’t the most impressive qualifications to hard-core liberal blog readers, but to Powell’s fellow moderate Republicans I think that’s a pretty heavyweight resume.

He doesn’t have F.D.R.’s joyful nature or Reagan’s happy outlook, but he is analytical. That’s why this William Ayers business doesn’t stick. He may be liberal, but he is never wild. His family is bourgeois. His instinct is to flee the revolutionary gesture in favor of the six-point plan.

This was not evident back in the “fierce urgency of now” days, but it is now. And it is easy to sketch out a scenario in which he could be a great president. He would be untroubled by self-destructive demons or indiscipline. With that cool manner, he would see reality unfiltered. He could gather — already has gathered — some of the smartest minds in public policy, and, untroubled by intellectual insecurity, he could give them free rein. Though he is young, it is easy to imagine him at the cabinet table, leading a subtle discussion of some long-term problem.

I just wonder about this approach to thinking about politicians. Suppose Obama really is “Fast Eddie” and the main difference between now and when Brooks didn’t like him is that he’s gotten better at lying? After all, Brooks says that key elements of Obama’s character were “not evident back in the ‘fierce urgency of now’ days” but now they are. But maybe “Fast Eddie” is just turning it on and off to suit his schemes. I feel pretty confident as a well-informed, skeptical person with Google at my finger tips that I can figure out when politicians are lying to me about policy or about their records. But a lot of this genre of punditry seems based on the idea that journalists can discern when politicians are and aren’t misleading with their presentation of self. But I have no reason to believe I’m especially good at this, and plenty of reason to believe that big-time politicians are unusually good at misleading about this sort of thing. There’s something to be said for just analyzing politics as a rigid ideologue and not trying to wade into these waters at all.

As I said yesterday I think we should expect to see a lot more of this kind of this kind of thing if Obama wins the election.