Jon Taplin's Blog

McCain's Rove Playbook

Pew Center Poll

Sometimes the tactics of the Karl Rove team advising John McCain just boggle the mind. Business Week’s marketing blogger David Kiley reported the following.

What the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was…wait for it…using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch. I guess that’s political hardball. But another word for it is the one word that most politicians are loathe to use about their opponents—a lie.

Pretty amazing how so few members of the traditional media are willing to use the word “lie” to describe what Karl Rove, Steve Schmidt and their slimeballs are doing. But of course McCain says he’s proud of these ads, so I guess they will continue. McCain is well aware that the enthusiasm gap among Republicans for his campaign is very low (chart above). He has no choice but to try to bring Obama down, since he will never get above 44%.

The source of McCain’s desperation is of course the polling in the battle ground states.

If you had told a Democrat a year ago that, on the last day of July, their candidate would be ahead in Ohio and Florida, well ahead in Pennsylvania , way ahead in California, tied in Montana, within single digits in a couple of states that went really red in 2000 and 2004, they’d be pretty thrilled with that set of polling.

Afghanistan Trap

The Obama campaign, anxious to prove they are tough on national security, should be careful not to fall into the trap of pretending we can solve Afghanistan’s problems with more soldiers. Rory Stewart, the brilliant British diplomat and writer who has spent so much time on the ground in Afghanistan, makes a compelling case in Time Magazine for another approach. 

First, the West should not increase troop numbers. In time, NATO allies, such as Germany and Holland, will probably want to draw down their numbers, and they should be allowed to do so. We face pressing challenges elsewhere. If we are worried about terrorism, Pakistan is more important than Afghanistan; if we are worried about regional stability, then Egypt, Iran or even Lebanon is more important; if we are worried about poverty, Africa is more important. A troop increase is likely to inflame Afghan nationalism because Afghans are more anti-foreign than we acknowledge and the support for our presence in the insurgency areas is declining. The Taliban, which was a largely discredited and backward movement, gains support by portraying itself as fighting for Islam and Afghanistan against a foreign military occupation. Continue reading ‘Afghanistan Trap’

How Low Can McCain Go?

Very slowly the establishment media is beginning to call McCain on his new super negative ads.  Even Republican pundits are worrying if McCain is going too negative too early.

By doing so, Mr. McCain is clearly trying to sow doubts about his younger opponent, and bring him down a peg or two. But some Republicans worry that by going negative so early, and initiating so many of the attacks himself rather than leaving them to others, Mr. McCain risks coming across as angry or partisan in a way that could turn off some independents who have been attracted by his calls for respectful campaigning.

Obama’s campaign has decided to address the issue head on.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPPLSHKH0h4]

McCain’s latest anti-Obama ad using Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears has even brought McCain’s long term strategist John Weaver,  to denounce the campaign management.

With the release today of a McCain television ad blasting Obama for celebrity preening while gas prices rise, and a memo that accuses Obama of putting his own aggrandizement before the country, Weaver said he’s had “enough.” The ad’s premise, he said, is “childish.” “John’s been a celebrity ever since he was shot down,” Weaver said. “Whatever that means. And I recall Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush going overseas and all those waving American flags.”

Juan Cole has suggested that the perfect celebrity pairing for John McNasty would be Amy Winehouse and Naomi Cambell. Any other suggestions?

Terrorism's End

One of the main themes of The Cost of Empire is that we are usually designing our military to fight the last war. A new report from the Rand Corporation says that the only way we will be able to fight Al Qaeda is to end “the war on terrorism.”

A recent RAND research effort sheds light on this issue by investigating how terrorist groups have ended in the past. By analyzing a comprehensive roster of terrorist groups that existed worldwide between 1968 and 2006, the authors found that most groups ended because of operations carried out by local police or intelligence agencies or because they negotiated a settlement with their governments. Military force was rarely the primary reason a terrorist group ended, and few groups within this time frame achieved victory.

Rand suggests we drop the phrase Global War on Terror and simple refer to the police operations as counter-terrorism.

 Calling the efforts a war on terrorism raises public expectations — both in the United States and elsewhere — that there is a battlefield solution. It also tends to legitimize the terrorists’ view that they are conducting a jihad (holy war) against the United States and elevates them to the status of holy warriors. Terrorists should be perceived as criminals, not holy warriors.

Since the US government probably paid for this report, what are the chances that anyone in the Pentagon or White House will read it?

Return to the Mean

Merrill Lynch just privately published to their clients a very scary report entitled, “The emperors’s new clothes in a post bubble society.” It picks up on some of the economic themes I talked about in “The Cost of Empire”, most specifically,

Regrettably, we have become a bubble society, always in search of the quick-fix strategy to build wealth – Tech, real estate, and now commodities (although though the latest action points to a break in corn and crude prices; corn is down 25% since the end of June!).

They then go on to make two predictions that are decidedly contrarian. The first, contrary to the belief of Morgan and some of our other hawks, is that market for bonds of good quality is going to skyrocket. There will be more demand than supply. Interest rates are not the problem.

Indeed, if there is another bubble around the corner, it is likely to be in bonds, and this will be particularly apparent once the commodity explosion reverses course. We are talking about fixed-income instruments that have an adequate level of credit quality and call protection to provide the type of income characteristics and capital preservation that will satisfy the needs of our society’s actuarial liabilities embedded in retirement portfolios, which represent the largest concentration of investment assets in the financial system ($17 trillion).

In other word’s retirees and pension planners appetite for risk has disappeared. Continue reading ‘Return to the Mean’

Bi-polar Bill Kristol

The New York Times’ resident right wing-nut, Bill Kristol, is on his shrink’s couch in public today. He takes us through his manic-depressive mood swings last Friday, contemplating a possible Obama victory in November.

Maybe they’ll decide it’s more important to have John McCain as commander in chief than Barack Obama as orator in chief. Maybe they’ll further suspect that 200,000 Germans can’t be right. I was cheered up by this notion.

But the next morning, as I drove around the Washington suburbs, I saw not one but two cars — rather nice cars, as it happens — festooned with the Obama campaign bumper sticker “got hope?” And I relapsed into moroseness.

The fact that Bi-polar Bill can’t imagine why someone with a “rather nice car”, could be displaying an Obama sticker, gets to the heart of the Neo-con dilemma. As he tells his shrink, “These people are class traitors.”

If you want to have a laugh, just tune into Rush Limbaugh some morning and listen to him go through a similar public manic-depressive episode. It’s a hoot. This is the beginning of the Big Conservative Crack-up. Get out the Oxycontin and the Thorazine.

Next Sub Prime Crisis–SUV Leases

2005 Dodge Durango

Chrysler announced Friday that it was closing down its auto lease business. This is the beginning of sub prime like write downs for auto companies. SUV’s bought three years ago, now being returned to dealers with a true value probably 50% below the auto company’s book value. Nobody want to buy a used SUV getting 15 MPG.They will be lucky if they can sell them for scrap. Ford took a $2.1 billion dollar write down on the value of its lease portfolio for just one quarter’s worth of returned cars. So we are talking about perhaps $9 billion in Ford financing losses for the year. Let’s assume both Chrysler and GM have similar problems and that the two big banks in auto leasing Well Fargo and Citibank have equally heavy portfolios filled with heavily marked down SUV’s. Could this be another $40 billion of finance writedowns this year?

Of course there is the other side of the auto finance business which is the straight auto loan business, where the bank is holding the car title as collateral for the loan. Here the sound of jingle mail (customers walking away from the payments and mailing in the keys to the bank) is getting painfully loud.

Former Fed Vice Chair Alan Blinder has a suggestion for a federal bailout of older more polluting cars, he calls “Cash for Clunkers.”

Cash for Clunkers is a generic name for a variety of programs under which the government buys up some of the oldest, most polluting vehicles and scraps them. If done successfully, it holds the promise of performing a remarkable public policy trifecta — stimulating the economy, improving the environment and reducing income inequality all at the same time.

Fairly wild idea, but we will need imagination in the next few months. Worth considering.

Barack World Tour Bump

Ronald Reagan’s great stagemaster Michael Deaver used to say, ‘forget all the talking heads, it’s the pictures that talk to the people’. I was pretty sure that Barack got the right pictures last week and now it’s beginning to show in the Gallup tracking poll. In the face of this, the McCain camp is getting increasingly desperate. Pollster.com electoral count says the election is basically over. All the Washington bloviators saying Barack’s trip was not important are looney tunes.

One final good sign for Obama, American’s are no longer confused about his faith.

Permanent War Economy

In 1964 at the height of the Cold War, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse in his book One Dimensional Man, made the following observation.

Free institutions (the media) compete with authoritarian ones in making the Enemy a deadly force within the system. And this deadly force stimulates growth and initiative, not by virtue of the magnitude and economic impact of the Defense “sector”, but by virtue of the fact that the society as a whole becomes a Defense society. For the Enemy is permanent. He is not in the emergency situation but in the normal state of affairs. He threatens in peace as much as in war (and perhaps more than in war); he is thus being built into the system as a cohesive power.

I think this is as relevant an analysis today of the ”Global War On Terror” (GWOT)  as it was in 1964 of the Global War on Communism. It is not easy sustaining the emotional hysteria needed to justify a permanent war economy. One need only look at the total U.S. Defense budget for the year 1950 of $13 Billion to understand that it had been our practice as a nation to have high defense budgets only in times of war. But both the Cold War and the GWOT were presented as open ended wars without end. To justify our current base Defense budget of $700 billion, we not only need to inflate the potential of Al Qaeda, Iran and North Korea, we also need to create the possibility that the Chinese Army might one day become our mortal enemy in a Third World War. Continue reading ‘Permanent War Economy’

Dionysis and War

Of the many personal messages I received in the last week on the Cost of Empire series, the most fascinating and troubling came from my friend Larry Gross. Larry is the most unique of Hollywood hybrids, the screenwriter/philosopher. He wrote classics like Walter Hill’s 48 Hoursand Clint Eastwood’s True Crimeand yet is deeply schooled in philosophy from Hegel to Baudrillard. Here’s a bit of what he wrote me.

Congratulations on this piece which is definitely important. I think there is one dimension further your analysis has to reach. One has to see how the totalizing vision of Wilson, Cold War, and the current neo-con Fantasia, are literally, to some extent,the bastard step children of certain impersonal consequences of technological change–the same change that has allowed for “universal” market solutions to economic problems. Continue reading ‘Dionysis and War’