Kevin Drum

MEDIA BIAS EXPLAINED....FINALLY....You may have noticed that conservatives have gone absolutely ga-ga over the idea that the media has been not just biased against them during this campaign cycle, but virtually bought-and-paid-for chattel of the Obama '08 campaign. "The national media has become a feminized, electronic vote-for-Obama nagging machine," says Dan Perrin. "Will the Obamedia cover that?" sneers Andy McCarthy about the cost of Obama's plane trip to visit his dying grandmother. (Seriously.) "Michael S. Malone at ABC beautifully, if tragically, with shame, reports on the 'get-a-room' performance of the national media in this presidential election year," says Jules Crittendon.

Michael Malone? The right-wing tech writer? Yep. Malone, it turns out, has the usual litany of complaints: Why isn't the press interviewing Obama's drug dealer? Why aren't they staking out Bill Ayers' home? What's up with Joe the Plumber? Etc. Kinda tedious. But if you make it to the end, there's comedy gold when he finally explains why the media is so in the tank for Obama. The reason, it turns out, is because the press is run by a bunch of fifty-somethings working in a dying industry:

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe — and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway — all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself — an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.

With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

That's the answer! It's not reporters who are the real problem, it's a cabal of middle age editors who are desperately trying to elect a president who will pay them back for their support by destroying blogs and rejuvenating the Newspaper Guild. Seriously. That's his theory. And, of course, it was worth a link from Instapundit.

But the big question is: how did he find out? Who leaked? Whoever it is, we need to find the bastard and make him pay. This could ruin everything.

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QUOTE OF THE DAY....From flat-taxer Andrew Sullivan, coming around to the idea that maybe progressive taxation is OK after all:

We have seen a massive shift in income inequality in the last couple of decades. Over time, that inequality can destabilize a democracy. It removes many from income tax altogether, it concentrates wealth in too few hands who can use it to corrupt the political system, and it leads to an oligarchy susceptible to populist onslaught (hello, Mr Dobbs). Aristotle's advice that polities should be concerned about the strength of the middle class, and that no democracy can long endure without one, is well worth absorbing.

A reader emailed me about this with understandable annoyance ("I give him two weeks before he quotes himself as coming up with this whole idea"), but I say: welcome to the party. Sure, Andrew's probably only saying this because he's currently in defend-Obama-at-all-costs mode, but still, Aristotle was right:

Those who have too much of the goods of fortune, strength, wealth, friends, and the like, are neither willing nor able to submit to authority....On the other hand, the very poor, who are in the opposite extreme, are too degraded....Thus arises a city, not of freemen, but of masters and slaves, the one despising, the other envying; and nothing can be more fatal to friendship and good fellowship in states than this: for good fellowship springs from friendship; when men are at enmity with one another, they would rather not even share the same path. But a city ought to be composed, as far as possible, of equals and similars; and these are generally the middle classes.

....Thus it is manifest that the best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class, and that those states are likely to be well-administered in which the middle class is large, and stronger if possible than both the other classes, or at any rate than either singly; for the addition of the middle class turns the scale, and prevents either of the extremes from being dominant. Great then is the good fortune of a state in which the citizens have a moderate and sufficient property; for where some possess much, and the others nothing, there may arise an extreme democracy, or a pure oligarchy; or a tyranny may grow out of either extreme — either out of the most rampant democracy, or out of an oligarchy; but it is not so likely to arise out of the middle constitutions and those akin to them.

You'd think that if Aristotle could figure this out 2,300 years ago, modern conservatives could figure it out too. Maybe soon they will.

UPDATE: From comments: "Aristotle was a damn Socialist! How come you don't have a counter-point from Hermias the Plumber?" Indeed.

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OBAMA'S AGENDA....Matt Ygelsias thinks Barack Obama is more activist than some people give him credit for:

Every time I read Ezra Klein pooh-pooing Barack Obama's domestic agenda, I feel a bit baffled. He's running on a platform that promises universal preschool, dramatic cuts in carbon emissions and investments in clean energy infrastructure, health insurance that would be affordable for all, comprehensive immigration reform, substantial labor law reform, large new spending on K-12 initiatives, and tax reform to make the federal code much more progressive overall.

I think that's a fair point. I'd say that his positions on tax reform (where the public face is primarily an endlessly repeated promise to cut taxes for almost everyone) and immigration reform (which hasn't gotten much public play at all) have been decidedly understated, but Obama has pretty clearly put himself on the side of big, important reforms in the areas of energy, healthcare and union organizing. (I'm a little less sure about education, where I feel like I sometimes get mixed signals about how big a priority this is with him. But that might just be the luck of the draw in which ads and speeches I happen to have seen.) He's also committed to withdrawal from Iraq, and so far at least, he hasn't backed away from that.

No question then: if Obama manages to get out of Iraq and pass significant legislation in the areas of healthcare and energy, and nothing more, that would make his first term wildly successful. If he also adds some serious labor law reform and financial market regulation to the mix, progressives ought to be pretty delirious by 2012.

The only question is, will he do it? The foundations all seem to be there (majorities in Congress, a viable electoral coalition, and a public seemingly open to change), but Obama's past history, both in the Illinois Senate and the U.S. Senate, is clearly one of caution and tactical compromise. In my case, then, my doubts lie not in whether he has the right policy instincts, but in whether he's got the temperament to seize the moment, stick to his guns, force recalcitrant committee heads to follow his lead, and get a big agenda passed. I sure hope so, but I think that's the big question mark, not whether he's campaigning on the right set of priorities.

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CHART OF THE DAY....Newspaper accounts of housing prices usually provide year-to-year comparisons, which are useful for some purposes but not for others. In particular, if house prices start to stabilize, you won't see it in the year-to-year charts because prices will still be way below their level from a year ago even if they aren't dropping any further. "21% below their peak" doesn't really tell you much about what's happening now.

For that, you want to see how prices compare to the previous month. Back in August I posted a Case-Shiller chart showing monthly comparisons (through June) that suggested prices might be stabilizing, but with a caveat that this stuff is seasonal and the good news might not hold up. Sure enough, it hasn't. Here is this month's chart (with prices through August), and it shows that month-to-month prices are not only still declining, but declining faster than they were earlier in the summer.

The rate of decline is still nowhere near its nadir in February, but this is yet more evidence that we still have a ways to go before housing prices bottom out. And people know it: this month the consumer confidence index fell to 38.0, lower than during the 1974 recession, lower than during the 1980 recession, lower than ever recorded before. And credit card companies are "sharply curtailing" credit lines. And to top it all off, we're running up an "ecological debt" of $4 trillion per year.

But the stock market is up! Why? Apparently because investors are looking forward to the Fed cutting interest rates tomorrow. Sure, the Fed is only contemplating this because the signs of recession are so bleak, and it's unlikely that interest rate cuts will have much of an effect anyway, but who ever said Wall Street investors were smart?

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