Rogue Columnist

Did you hear the one about sustainable Phoenix?

This week's Phoenix Laff Riot comes from the Arizona Republic, in a story headlined "Striving to be Green:

The Valley is lashed in national surveys for its poor air quality, derided for its urban sprawl and mocked for its searing temperatures and growing heat island.

But, despite these challenges, city boosters, business owners, environmentalists and academics all say Phoenix has a unique opportunity to become truly sustainable. They also say the Valley could squander that opportunity if it fails to make smart decisions now about growth, open spaces, wildlife and the economy.

Later in the story is the kind of cliche sentence editors wouldn't allow, if only they weren't in endless meetings and trying to put together graphics and assorted crap: "But only time will tell if the Valley can pull it off."

I hate to break the news, but time has told and "the Valley" can't pull it off.

Death of a salesman nation

Whatever its complicated and ambivalent historical roots, the ideal of Thanksgiving is offering gratitude for the grace of our creator, if you swing that way, or at the very least to others who came together to create even a moment of common purpose and bounty. It's about looking outside ourselves.

The problem of American holidays being ever more commercialized is old. But over the past decade, maybe longer, something else has overtaken us. We've gone from a nation with hucksters to being a nation of hucksters. Suffice it to say that this was not the great commercial republic that Hamilton had in mind. In God We Trust? No. Always Be Selling.

I thought of this as I read a Washington Post piece on how banking regulators were not actually regulating the industry, but rather acting as an advocate for it. Yes, ideology and its handmaiden deregulation are to blame for the financial catastrophe. But so is the perverse mutation of American optimism just as the economy became driven more and more by financial swindles.

Change? You can't be serious

Let the excuses begin.

The New York Times leads off:

Just as the world seemed poised to combat global warming more aggressively, the economic slump and plunging prices of coal and oil are upending plans to wean businesses and consumers from fossil fuel.

The Washington Post weighs in:

Many members of Congress believe they know what the car company of the future should look like. "A business model based on gas -- a gas-guzzling past -- is unacceptable," Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said last week. "We need a business model based on cars of the future, and we already know what that future is: the plug-in hybrid electric car."

But the car company Schumer and other lawmakers envision for the future could turn out to be a money-losing operation, not part of a "sustainable U.S. auto industry" that President-elect Barack Obama and most members of Congress say they want to create.

That's because car manufacturers still haven't figured out how to produce hybrid and plug-in vehicles cheaply enough to make money on them.

Expect to hear more in the coming days and months. We will see a potentially debilitating alignment of old thinking and old, yet still politically powerful, economic interests. If it succeeds, the country will face much worse pain in the years ahead.

President Hoover and Depression thinking

I feel the need to come to the defense of Herbert Hoover, if for no other reason than this fundamental misreading of history will only set us up for costly mistakes in the future. The left long has labeled George W. Bush "President Hoover" for presiding over a historic economic crisis. Now the meme has been picked up by the right, as well.

Yet to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, President Bush, you're no Herbert Hoover. Among the differences: Hoover (1874-1964) was a self-made man, who worked his way through the new Stanford University, made a fortune as a brilliant engineer, then gained international acclaim for coordinating relief for refugees in World War I. Although a Republican, Hoover came from the party's Theodore Roosevelt progressive wing. He was mistrusted by Calvin Coolidge, and for good reason. Hoover wanted to move away from the rapacious capitalism of the 1920s to an ethic that embraced the common good and the obligations of business to society. He was a product of his time of scientific and engineering wonders: The Great Engineer, who could bring pragmatic, fact-based solutions to governing.

Unfortunately, Hoover was elected in 1929, not 1912 -- the era in which his worldview had been shaped. After the great crash and with the gathering depression, Hoover was overwhelmed. His administration launched the greatest expansion of government intervention in the economy up to that point, including programs and ideas that would live on in the New Deal. Yet it did little good as unemployment reached a staggering 25 percent and Americans were forced into shantytowns they called Hoovervilles.

Worth considering...

Andrew J. Bacevich, retired Army colonel and intellectual, offered some profound thoughts a while back to Bill Moyers. They have "reality check in the Great Disruption" written large on them:

Our foreign policy is something that is concocted in Washington D.C., but it reflects the perceptions of our political elite about what we want, we the people want. And what we want, by and large - I mean, one could point to many individual exceptions - but, what we want, by and large is, we want this continuing flow of very cheap consumer goods.

We want to be able to pump gas into our cars regardless of how big they may happen to be, in order to be able to drive wherever we want to be able to drive. And we want to be able to do these things without having to think about whether or not the book's balanced at the end of the month, or the end of the fiscal year. And therefore, we want this unending line of credit.

And

There was a time, seventy, eighty, a hundred years ago, that we Americans sat here in the western hemisphere, and puzzled over why British imperialists went to places like Iraq and Afghanistan. We viewed that sort of imperial adventurism with disdain. But, it's really become part of what we do. Unless a President could ask fundamental questions about our posture in the world, it becomes impossible then, for any American President to engage the American people in some sort of a conversation about how and whether or not to change the way we live.

Weekend myth busters

Heard the one about the $70-an-hour autoworker bringing down the Big Three? Read the truth in Jonathan Cohn's New Republic article. Another Big Lie from talk radio -- and I've been getting the robot emails -- is that the subprime debacle was caused by the Clinton administration forcing banks to lend to minorities and the poor. Not true, according to the Bush administration's regulator. Tell your right-wing friends and relatives.

Napolitano moves on?

If Janet Napolitano becomes President Obama's Secretary of Homeland Security, the only shame will be that the cabinet post was not eliminated. The very name sounds un-American, like something out of 1984. The department has represented more bureaucracy, more money for politically connected private contractors, more dangers to civil liberties...and, gee, I don't know about you, but I don't feel safer.

The ambitious Arizona governor has long hoped to get an escape route through a Democratic administration in Washington. She had little hope of winning a Senate seat, and Arizona is more hopeless than when she came into office, as a surprise winner because of the state's scary downturn at that time -- by today's standards it looks like a upswing -- and a weak GOP rival. She won and retained her office by never taking on the Real Estate Industrial Complex.

On the other hand, she mentioned inconvenient truths, turned back the worst excesses of the Kookocracy, and did some good for poor children. Until Arizona Democrats take the Legislature, this is probably as good as it gets. That may be a long time coming, because outside of congressional gains -- largely due to national issues and extra-crackpot GOP rivals -- the Arizona Democratic Party seemed to gain little from having a  "popular governor." As for Napolitano, perhaps she learned that even if you are the smartest person in any room, that isn't necessarily a career builder in today's Arizona. Now she joins a large cohort of fortunate ex-pats with means, who can come back to the state in the declining number of pleasant days, but not have to actually live there.

And I guess Kookocracy darling and Secretary of State Jan Brewer, who brought extreme partisanship to a job that oversees the integrity of elections, will get to run for governor as an incumbent. You go, Arizona.

Los Arcos memories

The interior of Los Arcos Mall, at Scottsdale Road and McDowell Road.

I was recently interviewed by a graduate student at Arizona State University, who is writing on the history and prospects for the area of south Scottsdale around the former Los Arcos mall. Zonies might find the exchange of some interest:

What are your memories of Los Arcos growing up?

I lived about half a mile away during high school, from 1970 to 1974. We had moved there from central Phoenix. It was very much a cohesive neighborhood. Like most of Phoenix then, it was very lush with grass, trees and landscaping. It was homogeneous: middle-class Anglo families, many of whose fathers worked at Motorola.

It was fairly new, and much of McDowell didn’t even have sidewalks. You could still see farming going on a quarter mile north of Thomas Road. Scottsdale Road was barely developed; we have a stunning view of the buttes out the back of our house. Scottsdale itself was still partly rural, with a rustic/touristy downtown. There was not much north of Chaparral Road.

The neighborhood was centered on Coronado High School, which then was a very fine school, including one of the best fine arts departments in the country.

Missing the point on a Detroit rescue

An industry that has been poorly managed, with executives looting it for huge bonuses and protected employees compensated far beyond the average American, making products that have caused untold damage to the planet, comes to Washington seeking a bailout. Without it, the executives say, the entire economy could be severely damaged. Of course lawmakers should say "hell no."

But they didn't. When the so-called financial services industry asked for a "rescue," lawmakers couldn't move fast enough.

American automakers are a different matter. Asking a fraction of what has been plowed into Wall Street -- with not much to show for it -- they are getting the brush off from the Bush administration and much of Congress. Myths proliferate about union compensation, this from the same people who hail obscene executive compensation and bonuses for the top swindlers on the Street. In fact, the union has been giving back for 20 years.

It's striking that the same people who celebrate the bootstrapping entrepreneur and the sanctity of contract are contemptuous of blue-collar workers who have created most of the wealth in a given business and painstakingly negotiated labor agreements that allowed their families to reach the middle class. And there's much carping about how the top executives failed to build cars for an expensive-energy future or to protect the environment. Yet policymakers consistently refused to insist on even modest improvements. Now it's so easy to say to Detroit: Drop dead.

The man in the tiresome cliched casual duds

Whatever else might be said about the departure of Jerry Yang from Yahoo, I'll be glad to see him go. I'm sick of seeing the chief executive of a major company so badly dressed. Alas, he represents the spirit of the age.

I hate casual dress. I date the decline of our civilization not only by the demise of men wearing suits and ties, but by "casual" clothes becoming a mandatory business uniform. Far from being something that makes people comfortable, it's just the new man in the gray flannel suit -- except the latter looked better. This is no victory for choice or egalitarianism. When I wear suits, people invariably ask, "Why are you so dressed up?," as if I am in white tie. I want to ask, "Why are you so badly dressed?"

Nowadays, outside of a few professional pockets, it's the rebels that wear suits. (And women look smashing in them, too).

Why Arizona can't 'retool' its economy

Even under the ownership of Gannett, with a publisher whose command to the newsroom is to "say something positive about the community" and a huge loss of talent and institutional knowledge, the Arizona Republic -- er, Information Center -- still does its occasional "let's do the right thing" stories. The latest appeared Sunday.

This is not investigative, "put-em-in-jail" journalism. Rather, it represents a white paper on the things the "community" needs to do to get better. The Republic has been doing this at least since the 1980s, when it became clear that Phoenix was headed for a trainwreck. I certainly wrote my share. And nothing ever happens. Now I read them, as the real power brokers must do, for entertainment value.

Editors must have been on vacation to allow Chad Graham, one of the small cadre of real reporters, to write:

The Valley's economy could start to recover in 2010. That is when some economists believe the glut of excess homes will be absorbed and new residents will spark new construction.But if history is a guide, metropolitan Phoenix will only seem to rebound. Despite decades of real- estate run-ups, quality-of-life measures for the region continue to fall.

That's the truth. But, then, the paper sometimes allows such unpleasantness on its pages. After all nothing will happen. Then the usual-suspect "experts" talking about "wake-up calls" and "initiatives" for biotech or solar power. There's just one problem with all of this:

The Paulson scheme

If you've ever wondered why these CEOs make hundreds of millions of dollars even if their companies are laying off thousands, their remaining employees have largely seen their paychecks stagnate and their stocks are circling the drain... If you've ever wondered whether you, or even the office boy, could have done a better job...consider the case of Henry M. Paulson Jr., the Secretary of the Treasury and former chief executive of Goldman Sachs. As is now becoming clear, Paulson has little more clue than the office boy about addressing the financial crisis.

After more than a year of denying the gathering storm, he suddenly rushed to Congress demanding an open-ended bailout of Wall Street, "to save the financial system." First the plan was to buy the "toxic debt" that had brought down much of the system. He was urged to inject capital directly into banks but rejected this advice. When the credit system seized up he changed the bailout to...inject capital directly into the banks. Yet the banks still refuse to do much lending, even as they use the taxpayers' money to buy competitors and pay fat compensation to their executives. Now the bailout has been changed yet again, to help "consumers." Well, not exactly: money would be given to companies dealing in credit cards, car loans and student loans. Don't expect any help personally.

Meanwhile, the real economy keeps spiraling downward as 401(k)s are vaporized, a million people have lost their jobs this year, the retail sector is moving into bankruptcy court and Detroit is facing collapse. This is one last gift of the Bush administration. Paulson's actions aren't incompetence on the level of Brownie -- a political hack put in a critical position he for which he was completely unprepared. They may be worse.

They don't wish they knew how to quit him

Like the mistreated girlfriend who just can't quit the abusive fighter jock, the national press is again scritch-scritch-scritching at John McCain's door. His concession speech -- actually fumbling and average before a typically thuggish Phoenix crowd -- was "dignified," "his best speech of the campaign," and "where was this guy during the campaign?". Now the media are busy predicting the re-emergence of the "old McCain" to do good things for the republic, maybe even build bridges between the conservatives and the Obama administration.

Illusions die hard. John McCain worked hard throughout his career to cultivate the national media -- and for all our bravado, even the toughest in the working press can be seduced (whether they bend their principles as a result is another matter). He called them "his base" before the campaign required him to run as a hard-right extremist, right down to the media-blaming rhetoric.

Unfortunately for the media, they finally got a taste of the real, real McCain: a rather undisciplined, herky-jerky, shoot-from-the-hip opportunist, and most of the time a doctrinaire gunslinger for bankrupt, discredited conservatism. When he supported George Bush on torture after opposing him, he cut the last thread of my willingness to believe he was a "maverick" even on a few issues.

'How could they have been so foolish?'

World War I, the Great War, ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The War to End All Wars was actually a prologue to a bloody century that filled veterans' cemeteries across the world. Yet it was a special madness, right to the end. The armistice was well in place before 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918, yet fighting and dying went on right up to that moment.

The Great War in so many ways made the world we live in. It destroyed the old world, the last period of peace and globalization. A reader of history marvels in horror at four years of trench warfare, as the British, French, Germans and eventually Americans repeatedly send infantry "over the top" and into the hopeless cauldron of machine guns and high-explosive artillery. The great ossuary at Verdun holds the remains of 130,000 unidentified French and German soldiers that died in a battlefield covering less than eight square miles. More than 250,000 soldiers died in this one battle. Twenty million died in the war.

Nov. 11th is a time to memorialize, but also to reflect. The Great War, for example, hit at a time of discontinuity, a situation we again face. The leaders of both sides in World War I were unable to conceive of how the world had changed militarily since the last major European conflict. Machine guns and powerful artillery made their tactics obsolete. Yet so frozen were their minds that they had no real answers but to keep doing the same thing over and over, hoping for a better result, wiping out a generation of young men. Only exhaustion, internal unrest and the weight of American intervention brought the calamity to a close -- to be followed by an epidemic that killed another 20 million.

They had no excuse, considering that European armies had observers at the American Civil War, nearly half a century before, where many of the challenges of modern warfare were first bloodily displayed. Yet their minds were frozen in the past. The same thing could be said of the causes of the war -- to our age they seem trivial. These are today's members of the European Union; then they were linked by trade, a shared civilization and intermarriage of royal families.

Yet the leaders of these nations looked backward, particularly Germany's Kaiser Bill, as he was called by my grandmother, a woman for whom the close reality of the Great War never faded. They neither realized the changed world, nor the tools they possessed for self-destruction (or, had another path been taken, for redemption). The rest of the century, people would ask, "How could they have been so foolish?" Kipling, who lost his son in the war, wrote, "If any question why we died/ Tell them, because our fathers lied."

Take what lessons you will. America allowed itself to be misled into a Middle Eastern quagmire that has taken our blood and treasure, when even a casual reading of history would show it was folly and we had other threats at hand. We fumbled an insurgency in Iraq just three decades after painfully learning how to combat one in Vietnam. Now we're desperately trying to salvage unsustainable economic, living and transportation systems rather than reinventing them. We've fumbled into new tensions with Russia with the same oafishness of the British diplomats in 1914, though let us hope without the same consequences. We are paralyzed before the great dangers of global warming and peak oil. The times call for supple minds. Today, especially, we need to remember that.

Steering the right course on the auto bailout

General Motors is running out of cash. Think about that. What was once the company that embodied American strength is running out of cash. Little wonder that Detroit is angling to get its own "rescue package" from Washington. We should do it -- with serious strings attached.

Anyone who has lived in the Midwest can attest to the foundational nature of the auto industry to American manufacturing. It's not just the Big Three themselves, but the vast supply chain they have spawned, from steelmakers to precision machine tool companies to providers of all manner of parts. As we bail out a "financial services industry" that increasingly made little more than frauds and swindles, the auto industry, even heavily diminished from its former greatness, makes real products and is an essential prop of the middle class, particularly in the heartland. A hollowed-out economy can stand no more losses.

Yet the American industry is the author of many of its own problems. The decline of GM and its sisters began decades ago in an unholy alliance of complacency, greed and contempt for customers between management and labor leaders. Despite 20 years of plant closings and pledges of new days, the carmakers never really reformed. There's one exception: hundreds of thousands of union workers in the Big Three and parts makers lost their jobs -- and communities their livelihood. Contrary to a persistent mythology, the decline since the early 1990s has been almost entirely the fault of management, not the United Auto Workers.

And another...

The brutish and nasty reality of Arizona just keeps getting national prominence. Sunday's New York Times has this grim gem:

GILA BEND, Ariz. — Soon after Antonio Torres, a husky 19-year-old farmworker, suffered catastrophic injuries in a car accident last June, a Phoenix hospital began making plans for his repatriation to Mexico.

Mr. Torres was comatose and connected to a ventilator. He was also a legal immigrant whose family lives and works in the purple alfalfa fields of this southwestern town. But he was uninsured. So the hospital disregarded the strenuous objections of his grief-stricken parents and sent Mr. Torres on a four-hour journey over the California border into Mexicali.

For days, Mr. Torres languished in a busy emergency room there, but his parents, Jesús and Gloria Torres, were not about to give up on him. Although many uninsured immigrants have been repatriated by American hospitals, few have seen their journey take the U-turn that the Torreses engineered for their son. They found a hospital in California willing to treat him, loaded him into a donated ambulance and drove him back into the United States as a potentially deadly infection raged through his system.

By summer’s end, despite the grimmest of prognoses from the hospital in Phoenix, Mr. Torres had not only survived but thrived. Newly discharged from rehabilitation in California, he was haltingly walking, talking and, hoisting his cane to his shoulder like a rifle, performing a silent, comic, effortful imitation of a marching soldier.

“In Arizona, apparently, they see us as beasts of burden that can be dumped back over the border when we have outlived our usefulness,” the elder Mr. Torres, who is 47, said in Spanish. “But we outwitted them. We were not going to let our son die. And look at him now!”

To repeat: Torres was in the country legally. His crime apparently was to have brown skin and no insurance.

Another coup for the chamber of commerce

The Economist, the must-read of people worldwide who make decisions about where to deploy capital and attract talent, writes about Phoenix.

Just wondering...

Did the "Information Center" report that sacred cow ASU is firing 200 of its already underpaid adjunct faculty as part of $55 million in cuts?

Behind the talk of Republican reinvention

We hear much talk now about the Republican Party trying to reinvent itself, fixing its "brand," facing an "identity crisis" or entering a period of internecine war. I'm skeptical about all this. We knew where the Republicans were coming from in the primaries, with a phalanx of middle-aged, rich white guys as candidates. All they had to offer was the same discredited mantra of tax cuts, theocracy and fear, with perhaps the exception of the entertaining libertarian Ron Paul. John McCain emerged as the perfect vessel for this exhausted, intellectually bankrupt yet madly power-hungry political party.

In the wake of a crushing defeat, several bigwigs are meeting at the Virginia estate of Brent Bozell, including "prominent conservatives" such as Grover Norquist -- he of the lust to make government small enough to drown in a bathtub -- and the religious extremist Tony Perkins. Same old, same old. The reality is that the Republicans have been reduced to a Southern white regional party, with some appeal in Southernized white rural areas elsewhere and the rural white libertarian West. This was brought home in a remarkable map in the New York Times, showing party gains in 2008 vs. 2004.

It's not just that the party's limited bag of ideas have been shown to hold frauds, and has finally been soundly rejected by the public. It's not just that the politics of hysteria and hate don't work now. This is a party totally out of step with the country, which is more diverse and urbanized than ever -- even suburban voters recognized their essentially urban issues this time -- and becoming more so in the future. This is a party whose ruling creeds are incapable of dealing with a complex modern society or the multi-layered challenges of the 21st century. And whose hidden creeds -- policy crafted to ensure a plutocracy -- were exposed in the financial crisis.

Arizona, in a hole, calls for more shovels

It's difficult to get news out of Arizona since the state's largest newspaper became "The Information Center," pushed out many of its most experienced and talented journalists and put up a minimalist Web site that's little more informative than somebody's personal Blogspot page. But is it really true that Joe Arpaio and Andrew Peyton Thomas were re-elected? That voters approved a ban on any property-transfer taxes? That they outlawed gay marriage? That Arizona turnout was lower than the state's usually low number -- and during an election that saw a historic high of turnout back in the United States?

Apparently so. The Joe/Peyton coronation ensures that the public focus will remain on persecuting the poor and minorities, some of whom happen to be illegal aliens that allow the low-wage construction and tourism economy to thrive. Heaven forbid that the state pay attention to providing ladders up in the New Economy and avoid adding to the dangerous income inequality, linear slums and underclass already growing like kudzu there.

Gay marriage -- such a vital issue at a time of, oh, dwindling water supplies, awful schools, an economy in freefall and the state's vulnerability to global warming. One might ask, when will the tourism economy feel the brunt of a boycott by "the homosexuals" who also tend to have higher disposable income. California enacted a ban, too -- a last gasp of the suburban churchy bigots -- but voters there also passed high-speed rail and other progressive measures.

The prohibition on enacting real-estate transfer taxes ("Save Our Homes") will further hamstring government's ability to pay for the public investments desperately needed by this broiling dystopia. It won't save anybody's house, but it will keep the Real Estate Industrial Complex from paying even a modest amount into the commons from which it reaps so much profit. Meanwhile, infrastructure will be hopelessly behind, education remain at a Mississippi level and investments for competitiveness impossible to fund. All you struggling "home owners" with low-wage Arizona jobs and talk-radio-fed grievances -- you've been punk'd by the rich elites that run the state and keep you down.

It's amazingly backward looking, inward looking and tribal. Nothing in the election seems to have been attuned to helping Arizona prosper, or even survive, in the 21st century. The decisions by the voting minority don't even seem to take notice of the 21st century. And the sum of intolerance, ignorance and apathy is shocking -- even for those of us who have the battle scars from seeing what this once-promising place has become. But this is also what happens when most people don't vote.

Read more booster-busting reality about the state on Rogue's Arizona Crisis page, and past columns.

The morning after

As one reader said last night, "Glad you were wrong." Thank God, America appears to have at last repudiated the poisonous, destructive politics of the past. A ban on gay marriage in California may be the last hurrah, for awhile, for the "values voters" who never seem to have social justice or equality as a value. Minnesota: How could the land of Humphrey even come close to re-electing Norm Coleman? Arizona: So typical, so sad.

But good news abounds. Democrats increased their seats in Congress, unusual in a cycle after winning control. High-speed rail appears headed for a decisive victory in California, as well as big wins for transit projects in Northern and Southern California and Seattle. Elizabeth Dole, a onetime moderate Republican who allowed herself to be yoked to the most despicable extremist campaigning was thrown out. The once proud Republican Party finds itself reduced to a regional redoubt in the white South and the libertarian and Southernized parts of the country. And we have President-elect Obama. Thank God.

Now the hard work begins. Rather than discuss the policies needed for the new administration, let's begin with a more fundamental, foundational task. After years of distractions about gays, "the real America," red states vs. blue, color-coded terror threat levels, the right to bring guns in bars, socialism, blah-blah-blah, we must begin the difficult task of returning to the reality-based world.

LANDSLIDE

Some journalists still know they are writing the first draft of history, as with the magisterial lede from Adam Nagourney's story in the New York Times:

Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.

The election of Mr. Obama amounted to a national catharsis — a repudiation of a historically unpopular Republican president and his economic and foreign policies, and an embrace of Mr. Obama’s call for a change in the direction and the tone of the country. But it was just as much a strikingly symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation’s fraught racial history, a breakthrough that would have seemed unthinkable just two years ago.

This moment

And so it comes down to this. A day that will mark the most important election in my lifetime and certainly the most consequential since 1932. The polls show Obama leading and yet... One wonders how wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III, standard bearer for the Party that Wrecked America, could have even 41 percent support, much less higher, much less be, perhaps, competitive in Pennsylvania, Florida and Virginia.

This support for a candidate who wholly represents the ruinous governing philosophy of conservatism -- a set of ideas so discredited, exhausted and out of step with the values of most Americans that McCain's only strategy was a dishonorable campaign of despicable attacks on his opponent and riling up a hateful "base." The man who claims "Country First" picked -- or was forced to pick -- the most unqualified and dangerous vice presidential candidate in American history. Who are these supporters and what are they thinking? Has ignorance, television-induced brain damage and Republican hate finally pushed us past the tipping point? And election fraud, that determinative agent of the 2000 and 2004 elections, is an ever present danger. And the confluence of moneyed interests that fears Obama.

And yet, we have this moment, this last chance. John Adams reflected the realism of the Founders when he said democracies always eventually commit suicide. Decades later Lincoln rightly called this an experiment, not a fixed or secure order in human events. Now the American generations living will be tested at history's fulcrum.

Says a lot...

Barack Obama is holding his election night party in Chicago's Grant Park, a public space. Wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III will hold his at the exclusive, secluded Arizona Biltmore.