No help for their candidate

Maybe I’m reading to much into this. But if congressional Republicans wanted to help John McCain, wouldn’t they have slowed things down and tried to make it look like McCain’s parachute drop onto Capitol Hill was — well, if not exactly crucial, then at least helpful?

Instead, Republicans and Democrats have reportedly just about wrapped up the bailout legislation, leaving McCain looking foolish, and with nothing better to do Friday evening than to head to Mississippi for the first presidential debate.

Here’s a hilarious tidbit from the Politico:

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said that “nobody mentioned McCain” during the several-hour-long meeting on the $700 billion market rescue plan, other than Frank. “They winced when I did,” said Frank. He went on to compare Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to “Andy Kaufman and his Mighty Mouse: Here I am to save the day.”

I am amazed at how unsteady McCain’s behavior is compared to eight years ago — or, for that matter, eight months ago.

Time out on OT

The Boston Globe keeps adding to its roster of niche publications, which is smart. It plans to charge 50 cents for its new sports weekly, OT, which may not be so smart.

I could see something like OT being a howling success with advertisers if it were freely available. But I’m not sure people are going to lay out money for sports news that is not substantially different from what’s on the Web — even if OT is better written and more insightful, which it may well be with the likes of Charlie Pierce and Tony Massarotti writing for it.

We’ll see.

Wilkerson run would break no rules

Few observers of local politics are as astute as Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi. But I can’t agree with her that state Sen. Dianne Wilkerson, D-Roxbury, is somehow breaking the rules because she will try to keep her seat with a write-in campaign if she doesn’t win the Democratic primary recount.

(Aside: I am referring only to the rules of running an independent campaign. I am not referring to the numerous tax and campaign-finance rules Wilkerson has broken over the years, which are the reason her political career may now be going down the drain.)

Wilkerson’s challenger, Sonia Chang-Díaz, may be the Democratic nominee (pending the recount results), but the rules allow Wilkerson to run as an independent, even though her name won’t appear on the ballot.

And though Wilkerson won’t be the party’s nominee, there is nothing to stop her from calling herself a Democrat (which seems to offend Vennochi), or a radical syndicalist, or Irene.

Vennochi tries to draw an unfavorable comparison between Wilkerson and U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., who was re-elected as an independent after he lost a Democratic primary race in 2006. Lieberman, Vennochi writes, had the “grace” to run “as a third-party candidate.”

But Lieberman took the same branding approach as Wilkerson, referring to himself as an “Independent Democrat,” which sounds like a Democrat, only better:

I remain a Democratic [sic] but I’m running as an Independent Democrat, which in some ways makes official what I’ve been for a long time. I’ve been an independent Democratic [sic]. [Note: I haven’t listened to the audio, but I assume those are transcription errors, not evidence that Lieberman can’t talk.]

Wilkerson’s free to run, and the voters are free to re-elect her or reject her. Those are the rules.

An offer Obama has to refuse

Let’s assume, for a moment, that there might actually be some substantive value to the presidential campaign being suspended so that John McCain and Barack Obama can lock themselves in a room until the financial crisis has been solved. How might it have been handled if McCain weren’t being entirely political?

Here’s an answer: McCain could have approached Obama quietly. If Obama agreed, they could make a joint announcement. If not, then McCain could go public and grab whatever political advantage was to be had.

So what actually happened? As best as we can tell, McCain announced publicly and unilaterally that he was going to suspend his campaign, blindsiding Obama — after spurning agreeing to Obama’s private request to issue a joint statement earlier today. Obama can’t go along, because he’d look weak and subservient. McCain knows that, which is why he made Obama an offer he has to refuse.

It’s a big gamble. McCain might end up looking ridiculous. His hope is that Obama will look crassly political instead.

On the merits, the whole thing strikes me as absurd. The White House and Congress are working on a bailout package that everyone involved seems to think will get done within days.

Friday’s scheduled presidential debate is not a sporting event that should be canceled on the grounds of misplaced priorities. It’s serious business, the business of democracy. Let’s get on with it.

Explaining an unexplained dip

The New York Times’ Steve Lohr today writes about the growing furor over executive pay, and the widening disparity between what top company officials make as compared to average workers.

But the story is accompanied by a chart, based on statistics from the Economic Policy Institute, that shows a huge dip in the disparity earlier in this decade. Today, according to the chart, the disparity is rising once again, though it has not yet reached the heights of 2000.

Nowhere in Lohr’s story is the blip explained. (Not that I’m blaming him — he probably had no idea that particular chart would be used to accompany his reporting.)

What’s the explanation? According to an Economic Policy Institute report from June 21, 2006:

The ratio surged in the 1990s and hit 300 at the end of the recovery in 2000. The fall in the stock market reduced CEO stock-related pay (e.g., options) causing CEO pay to moderate to 143 times that of an average worker in 2002. Since then, however, CEO pay has exploded and by 2005 the average CEO was paid $10,982,000 a year, or 262 times that of an average worker ($41,861).

OK, I suppose we could have figured that out. But someone at the Times should have seen that the chart did not perfectly match Lohr’s reporting that chief-executive compensation has risen from 35 times to 275 times that of the average worker since the 1970s. It’s true, but stuff happened in between, too.

George Will thrashes McCain

Conservative columnist George Will absolutely goes off on John McCain:

For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are “corrupt” or “betray the public’s trust,” two categories that seem to be exhaustive — there are no other people….

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

The proximate cause of Will’s dismay is what he calls McCain’s “fact-free slander” of Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox.

These are very tough words coming from perhaps our best-known conservative pundit.

The Red Sox’ first Latino superstar

In today’s Boston Globe, Keith O’Brien writes about the diminishing number of Latino players on the Red Sox — and compares the current team to the all- or mostly white teams of the past.

Point taken. But O’Brien steps in it when he refers to a “team whose stars typically looked like Ted Williams or Carl Yastrzemski” in describing those mostly white line-ups. The problem here is that Williams, as many knowledgeable fans know, was only the greatest Latino star in baseball history.

Williams’ mother, Micaela “May” Venzor, was the daughter of parents who were born in Mexico, Pablo Venzor and Natalia Hernández. In his 1969 autobiography, “My Turn at Bat,” Williams, who himself was born and grew up in San Diego, writes of his mother:

Her maiden name was Venzor, and she was part Mexican and part French, and that’s fate for you; if I had had my mother’s name, there is no doubt I would have run into problems in those days, the prejudices people had in Southern California.

May Venzor Williams was a volunteer for the Salvation Army, an avocation that kept her away from home most of the time, and about which her son complains bitterly in “My Turn at Bat.”

O’Brien’s mistake is not unusual. In 2005, the New York Times groused that Williams had been left off Major League Baseball’s list of “Latino Legends.” Williams’ Latino background is not well-known. But that makes it no less real.

“The left’s favorite conservative”

Good Howard Kurtz profile today of New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Though I often disagree with Brooks, I’ve always liked his work. So it was somewhat disconcerting to read that my admiration for Brooks borders on cliché: according to Kurtz, Brooks is “sometimes cast as the left’s favorite conservative.”

Fair enough. Brooks is, after all a moderate conservative whose views on cultural issues are a lot closer to mine than, say, to Mike Huckabee’s.

I thought it took a while for Brooks to find his legs as a Times columnist. His longer pieces in the Weekly Standard and the Atlantic Monthly were terrific. At the Times, though, the tyranny of having to write short and the pressure of being the token conservative seemed to lead him to write agit-prop that I doubted even he believed.

Brooks has long since found his voice, though, as evidenced by his nuanced, shifting view of Barack Obama. Of course, he may just be trying to keep his Obama-supporting wife and kids happy.

Photo (cc) by DoubleSpeak with Matthew and Peter Slutsky and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Those greedy low-income seniors

Some mighty odd rhetoric this morning from the McCain campaign, which falsely claims that Barack Obama wants to raise taxes on everyone earning more than $42,000 a year. Boston Globe reporter Michael Kranish writes:

Democrat Barack Obama has proposed eliminating the federal income tax for senior citizens on income below $50,000, which his campaign says would mean that 7 million seniors would not pay the tax, with an average tax cut of $1,400….

McCain, meanwhile, has not proposed a tax cut specifically for seniors. “We haven’t tried to target every demographic, the way Obama does with a handout, so we don’t have that,” McCain economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin said.

A “handout”? What is Holtz-Eakin saying? That tax cuts are just fine as long as they’re not targeted to low-income senior citizens?