You linked to the comments rather than the post.

Thanks, fixed.

It's correct about what each candidate is presently claiming, not about what each candidate is likely--or will be able--to do. Each will have to work within the system, ala HRC's claims, should he win.

Each will have to work within the system

To a degree. However, this is likely to be a watershed election with a big and lasting political realignment (God, I hope so, anyhow). This presents an opportunity to take on The System™ in a way not possible in other years, and actually move the political center leftward for the first time in decades. It's the reason why the measured, moderate rhetoric of both Clinton and Obama seems to me like the wrong message at the wrong time.

The Republicans are imploding as they realize the deal they made with the Devil religious right is coming to its logical conclusion. It isn't a time for feel-good let's-all-get-alongism.

This presents an opportunity to take on The System™

You clearly missed Matrix III. Also, I think worry should be focused on the differences in the coalition that various candidates put together rather than rhetoric, because no candidate will do more than what his or her supporters demand. If economic justice is your biggest concern, Edwards is clearly your man. (That said, that seems like the least tractable of all possible problems.)

I'm becoming fine with any of them. Even HRC, much though her people blow.

I'm becoming fine with any of them. Even HRC

If you like your Republicans with D's after their names, she's the one for you.

That's very much my sense of what the candidates are saying, and it's exactly why I'm supporting Edwards.

I think a big part of it as well, that Edwards and Obama realize but Hillary doesn't seem to as fully (understandably when her "experience" occurred during 8 years of her husband pulling Republican and Democrat teeth to get any legislation passed), is just how big a part of The System the president is.

New president, large mandate, change in Congress: there's considerable support for new legislation. Sure, inertia sets in shortly and legislators start petty turf wars and earmarking soon, once they think voters are no longer paying attention, but there's a lot of room in that first half year to a year for a couple pieces of major new law to come through. And they can have huge effects on the future debates.

Hell, just look at the tax cuts and NCLB from the beginning of Bush's first term. Major changes in federal funding that have changed the entire terms of the current tax debate (even the progressive candidates are just hoping to get tax rates reverted to the normal 90s rates) and have probably permenently expanded federal education funding. Edwards and Obama seem to realize this power, and seek to use it as well as possible. Once legislation is a fait accompli, inertia will at least tend to keep it in place, and the terms of future debates (The System itself) are changed forever.

I just can't believe how annoyed I am by the current congress.

In my lifetime, we had eight or so years of a popular Democratic President and a Republican congress, during which the president was apparently unable to accomplish anything the people who voted for him wanted him to because, after all, he can only sign things the legislature gives him, and they refused to give him anything. So, apparently, the power rests in the legislature and the president only has the bully pulpit, which does not actually accomplish anything no matter how popular the president's agenda is.

Then, we had six years of a Republican president and a Republican congress, during which they successfully enacted a large amount of their policies designed to harm people and bankrupt the country in the interests of global businessmen.

Now, we have an unpopular Republican president and a Democratic congress, and the Republicans are still able to accomplish everything they want, no matter how unpopular, to because apparently now all the power rests with the president because he has veto power.

Also, I'm not clear on why Republicans are allowed to filibuster everything, while Democrats are not. It can't be entirely because the media believes that it's so, can it?

I thought the Edwards ad embedded here was pretty sweet, and relevant to this topic.

Republicans are still able to accomplish everything they want

I think this isn't quite the case; the accomplishments have pretty much stopped. It's just that the rollback of previously established stuff we all hoped was coming has proven impossible without a Democratic executive.

11: Right. Also, most of their 'accomplishments' are about breaking the government, which is just fundamentally easier than making it function.

9: But Bush and the Republicans didn't get everything they wanted over the last six years. When it came to Social Security privatization, the Democrats were strong and united, and beat down the major legislative initiative of a newly-reelected president with an expanded GOP majority in Congress. When Democrats want to get something done - or at least, prevent something of Bush's from getting done - they clearly can. What's become fairly obvious here is that when it comes to war, torture, domestic spying, habeas corpus, and other issues of basic civil liberties, the Democratic Party as an institution doesn't consider them worth fighting for.

I didn't have high hopes for this session of Congress. I knew a ton of good legislation would get filibustered. But there was one thing I was assured of, over and over again, by netroots types, and that was that there would be an end to the hideous evil shit - that because Democrats would now control the legislative agenda, bills like the Military Commissions Act wouldn't come to the floor. Ha fucking ha. Not only did the Democrats legalize warrantless spying last summer, Harry Reid's about to make sure that the spies get immunity from prosecution for having spied before he made it legal. That's not even counting the number of times these assholes have funded the war with no strings attached.

And of course, that's the pool from which our current presidential candidates are drawn. As I've said before, I think Edwards is the least bad of them, because I do think he honestly cares about people who've gotten fucked by capitalism. How that will translate once he's in office with a Congress of cowards and troglodytes, I've no idea.

Place thy faith in politicians, and thou will be repaid not fucking at all.

However, this is likely to be a watershed election with a big and lasting political realignment

People always think this.

15: People always think this.

In 1980, they were right. History has yet to judge 2000, and I have high hopes that that election's effects will turn out to be ephemeral, but I'm not as optimistic on that score as apo appears to be.

14 -- No one is talking about faith. The notion that there's no difference between the parties, though, is only correct at the intellectual level of a Labrador retriever.

15 -- And in US politics, it's always true. Or has been since the start of the 20th century, at least.

Ignore the second half of that -- I hit the post bottom in haste, before finishing the thought.

People always think this.

I know, but I'm increasingly convinced the economy is going to melt down over the next year.

re: 19

It's well down that road already, I think.

20: yep. Here's a pessimistic question: when do you think we will be back to the times when no one thinks "This could be a good election to lose"?

You've all heard that Lieberman endorsed McCain, right? Maybe it's just my descent into madness, but that made me laugh.

Well, I think Dodd's decision to actually fight the ridiculous FISA bullshit has made me a Dodd supporter, and I'm in for some money if anyone, no matter how ridiculous I find them, decides to primary Reid. What's the breakdown of political independents? Disguised, dislocated, deliberators, disengaged? Count me in as "disgusted".

Krugman: "Which brings me to a big worry about Mr. Obama: in an important sense, he has in effect become the anti-change candidate."

24:OOOOh, Krugman is dead on. I might prefer Romney to Obama, because Romney would be checked by the Dem Congress.. Has anyone looked at his economic advisors? University of Chicago & worse. I get a link if you want.

I fear Obama will caucus with the Republicans, get twenty Senate Repub votes for stuff like SS Reform, and dare Democrats to get in his way. Obama is center-right.

And well, I am always more concerned about domestic & economic issues than foreign policy. IMO, the Democratic Party has been all fucked up since Vietnam, and let economic policy lose while not stopping the wars.

Get the economics right and you can stop the wars. The other way is a road to tragedy.

The timing is breaking my heart. If the primaries were only 3-6 months down the road, Edwards would win everything. As it is, Clinton or Obama will get the nomination, and we, middle America, are going to get horribly fucked.

There are leftist arguments against the New Deal, arguments short of Leninism referencing European Social Democracy, that even lead me to believe that Universal Health Care without more worker political empowerment will be a net loss.

How about an Unfogged vote with all the candidates (R, D, and none of the above?) Anonymous with those little buttons and one vote per person?

The D blogosphere seems pretty solid for Edwards, except for those who have decided he has no chance.

Or maybe multiple votes, one D frontrunning 3 only, all D, and all D and R.

Obama's economic team, found two

"Austan Goolsbee, a 38-year-old star University of Chicago Business School professor and New York Times columnist "

"Michael Froman, a Citigroup executive" (just the guy we want in the financial crisis, right)

No fucking way. Better than Kling & Mankiw, but people like Goolsbee who are called by the MSM "centrist Democrats" are way too right for me.

Clinton would be better, tho still bad. Gotta be Edwards.

The economy is definitely melting down. And not just the economy, but the well-being of ordinary people to whom the "economy" is irrelevant.

Place thy faith in politicians, and thou will be repaid not fucking at all.

The constant backing-down of every so-called left-wing leader on every so-called national security issue is just awful. If they'd give me a reason to trust them, maybe I'd believe they know secrets that I don't know and I should trust them. But they never tell us to trust them anyway.

Have we had an Official Unfogged Presidential Primary?

We should. You get one vote.

And even the DC residents can play!

I might prefer Romney to Obama, because Romney would be checked by the Dem Congress.

Yes, because if the past year is proof of anything, it's that Democrats are certainly eager to restrain the power of a Republican president.

28 - I know "Chicago economics" is enough to raise the hackles of any sensible person, but Austan Goolsbee seems to mostly be an expert on Internet and telecom economic policy, not how we should all be out there rooting for Pinochet. His appearance in Katharine Seelye's recent piece of hackjobiness over the Obama health plan is not reassuring, but I don't see any reason to think that he's going to steer Obama to the path of anti-Keynesianism.

Obama will caucus with the Republicans, get twenty Senate Repub votes for stuff like SS Reform

Obama isn't for generic "SS Reform" in scary capital letters, he's for raising the cap on payroll taxes, a center-left reform endorsed by - among others - Paul Krugman and John Edwards. It's a tax hike, and one that I'm on board with, as the last 400-plus comment thread on the subject demonstrated. If you can find me five current Republican senators who'd endorse that, I'll eat my pith helmet.

22: Jesus, I don't know if I laughed, but that definitely struck me. I mean, we all joke about McCain and Lieberman being of one non-Democratic party of McLiebermanism, but now it's been made explicit.

I also wondered whether Lieberman would win the Connecticut Senate election if it were held today, given that he's become a much more vocal supporter of Bush's war policy since then. He supported the surge even though he'd pledged to do everything to get the troops home as soon as possible. Then I concluded that even now he probably would, because he has the Republican vote tied up and enough Democratic leaning voters care more about incumbency than party. That made me really sad.

I presume this means McCain is the frontrunner for the national Connecticut For Lieberman party's presidential nomination?

Re 8. NCLB had a big bump in the first two years, then 'nada. That's at least as far as Title I was concerned. THe average across the whole thing is about a 3 percent real increase per year. It's more than nothing, but the new mandates for tutoring and public school choice take up much of this, meaning there's only a tiny improvement in funding for schools to improve their programs. Not all hat and no cattle. But more hat than cattle.

but people like Goolsbee who are called by the MSM "centrist Democrats" are way too right for me

Dude. You're saying Clinton would be better than Obama because he has Goolsbee as an advisor? Do you even know the guy, or have any familiarity with his research?

How about this paper, in which he showed that the tax hikes of 1993 produced very little long-term reduction in taxable income, producing empirical support for higher marginal rates with low deadweight losses?

Or this one, where he dug through a lot of the previous research used to support Laffer Curve arguments and eliminated spurious correlations only to find that most of the past evidence for rich people substantially lowering their taxable income when facing higher marginal rates disappears under scrutiny. Except for the people in the 80s, because they were just filthy greedy bastards.

Or how about this 2002 paper in which he supports the idea of electronic, return-free 1040 forms to simplify taxes years before Edward's campaign picked up on it?

U of C's econ and finance departments are not a unified ideological front like people seem to think. They're nowhere near. But the profs are damn good researchers, and the ones I've run into have all been very aware of the limits of what econ can tell you versus where politics and justice take over.

34:If you can find me five current Republican senators who'd endorse that, I'll eat my pith helmet.

Point is, that is the starting negotiating position Obama will take to the table to negotiate with Republicans. Repubs might well accept it for a price, tax cuts elsewhere, raising retirement age, partial privatization.

This current Congress ought to show how ruthless the opposition is, and I think Obama has taken the wrong lesson from his term in the Senate. I think he wants to make concessions to Republicans to "get stuff done", and I think that is his starting point. He will fuck us.

Edwards will declare war like no President since FDR, and FDR got a lot of his best, most lasting achievements in the 2nd term by demonizig Republicans, comservatives, & business throughout his 1st term. Obama wll help Republicans get re-elected, he is not a party-builder. He brings the Democratic Party nothing good we don't already have.

38:Where is Petey?

2008 is an opportunity to shift the country to the left. I said Goolsbee wasn't Mankiw or Kling, but "not crazed lying Republican hack" is a very low bar. Goolsbee isn't even Robert Reich or Krugman or Stiglitz, and "centrist economist" is an unacceptable to me in these polarized times. I want someone to whom UoC wouldn't grant tenure. I want someone Republicans hate & fear.

Bob I think you blew it rhetorically by referring to the Democratic Party as "we". They've got you now! You'll do whatever they want!

Edwards will declare war like no President since FDR

FDR had a massive economic collapse to use as leverage. He also had a huge majority in Congress. And he also campaigned for president not as a give-em-hell social democrat, but as a moderate reformer.

I want someone to whom UoC wouldn't grant tenure.

Why? What's the point in that? Economics and academic tax policy are all about finding out the best ways to pull money out of the economy while leaving it intact. It's important stuff that anyone who's trying to add hundreds of billions of universal health care spending should know.

What's the possible benefit of putting that advisory capacity in the hands of someone whose ability to interpret historical data is so questioned that no reputable school would touch them? They may be batshit, but it probably won't be in the way you like. A top economist like Goolsbee who's sympathetic to progressive aims can use the best theory and empirical research to try make them work as well as possible.

FDR had a massive economic collapse to use as leverage. He also had a huge majority in Congress.

Not impossible for both of those to exist in 2009.

Not impossible for both of those to exist in 2009.

Gawd, I hope not. Better GWB III than that.

Why? What's the point in that?

It's a black helicopters thing; you wouldn't understand.

45, the likelihood of one is unrelated to the likelihood of another.

Better a massive economic collapse with someone consciencious in charge than a massive economic collapse with someone inept and evil in charge.

42: Thanks, stras. I think that coming in for a fight from the very beginning really is the wrong way of doing things. It gets your opponents to expect a fight, too. Obama has been laying out quite strong progressive policies, laying down similar anchors for later negotiations as those laid by Edwards, only he's less likely to have the people across the table come out with guns ablazing at the very beginning.

It's way easier to pick your enemy's pocket if they think you just want to hug them.

Not impossible for both of those to exist in 2009.

No. But still pretty unlikely. The New Deal was an historical aberration; the American system is designed to be incredibly resistant to the kind of sweeping changes FDR implemented. There isn't going to be another FDR in 2009; at best, we might get a health care bill that isn't totally gutted by the time it emerges from conference committee.

As for Obama, I know I'm falling for Bob's trolling, but the case that he's making is simply absurd. Anyone who looks at Obama's actual record, positions on the issues, and policy team would come away with the conclusion that he's to the left of Clinton; Bob is saying that Mitt fucking Romney would be preferable to an Obama presidency. And yes, I know this is McManus here, and I'm being trolled by a random opinion generator, but still.

Just a side note: the referenced post illustrates just why Atrios is Atrios. He has gotten shit around here for his sometimes content-lite style (although he's been all over Big Shitpile, as he was all over SS - he picks his battles, and doesn't yatter on if he has nothing much to say on the topic of the day), but his pithiness is unmatched, which is invaluable in this media environment. We've got wonks, snark, and analysis in spades; I'm not sure any of the other A- or B-list bloggers could have summarized this race so aptly, so concisely. And I think there's a deceptively large amount of value in that.

I'm being trolled by a random opinion generator

Whereas with stras you're guaranteed the same opinion every time: if a Clinton's for it, she's against it. Including universal health care and Social Security.

With Kerry, we kept hearing that he was a fighter, a strong closer. I feel like with Obama we're getting the same vague assurances that, even though we haven't actually seen it happen yet, he can be tough on Republicans. I'd like to actually see it before I vote for the guy.

For 25 years, the Ds have been bringing knives to a gunfight. From what I've heard, Obama wants to assure us that he would do no such thing: he'll never carry a knife. It may arouse The Village, but I'm not especially convinced it will disarm the Republicans.

"It's way easier to pick your enemy's pocket if they think you just want to hug them"

I can't believe this blog is preferring the candidate most likely to make nice woth the Republicans, because he is the candidate etc. And with a likely stronger Democratic Congessional Majority liberals still want to go with the hugger.

After 40 years of watching the Republicans nominate their candidate most likely to drive Democrats batshit crazy, and winning the majority of policy fights.

And the economy starting,,oh about now but only beginning, is not going to be depression bad, but will be worse than you expect. But we will have the wrong candidate to be able to use it.

I don't have any real policy beefs with Obama. There are things here and there that I'd do differently, but that's true of all of the candidates. My problem is the "rising above partisanship" stuff. Christ almighty. If you learn nothing else from the past 20 years, learn that the game isn't played that way. Fucking hit somebody already.

I'd like to actually see it before I vote for the guy

When have Edwards or Clinton shown the ability to take on the Republicans and get legislation passed over opposition? It's not the sort of thing that happens very often, and requires either savvy handling of procedural politics if you've got party seniority in a legislative body or the bully pulpit of the presidency if you have the poll/election results to back you up. None of the current candidates have that kind of track record, and few if any candidates ever do. In the end, you usually just have to trust the person who you think will be better at convincing the nation that they are right.

43: What's the possible benefit of putting that advisory capacity in the hands of someone whose ability to interpret historical data is so questioned that no reputable school would touch them?

Po-Po goes to UC and majors in econ?

Po-Po Bob said what he said. Not "any reputable school", just "the U of C". Two different things!

The U of C econ dept. has earned its reputation, though I'm sure there are individual exceptions.

the ones I've run into have all been very aware of the limits of what econ can tell you versus where politics and justice take over.

Yeah, but they can be creepy when they talk about politics and justice.

Fucking hit somebody already.

Can't hit somebody if you're the black guy who wants to win. That's another thing that has begun to trouble me about his candidacy. At a bare minimum, he needs some mean surrogates.

"Po-Po" is a really efficient insult. I love when Emerson gets bitchy.

Can't hit somebody if you're the black guy who wants to win.

And can't win if you won't hit somebody (I'm very sure of that, less so of the former). Unfortunate, but there we are.

Can't hit somebody if you're the black guy who wants to win.

I'm really not sure that's true in Obama's case. I think he's got room to be a lot more combative without changing the racial dynamics of his run. (I'm really unsure about those -- I don't know how his race is going to play out at all. But I don't think he's close enough to the 'angry black man' image that might hurt another black candidate that getting aggressive would hurt him.)

The U of C econ dept. has earned its reputation, though I'm sure there are individual exceptions.

It earned that reputation back in the mid-70s. Ten years before I was even born, and at least a decade before most of the current professors even entered college. Departments change, and I'd bet even the old appearance of an entire school of tiny Friedmanites was false. He was just the loudest guy for a long time, and one hell of a good debater/theorist.

Yes, the U of C's bad reputation is old and tested. When did the school change, and what is the evidence that it did?

I find Becker and Leavitt obnoxious. The others are unfamiliar to me. I've never heard a good thing about the place from a political angle.

60 - it is true that the US government established an institute at U of C to train as many Friedmanites as possible. But they also did that at Berkeley. The goal was to create Friedmanite movements in third-world countries that were at risk of having egalitarian-leaning governments.

I've never heard a good thing about the place from a political angle.

Has there ever been an economics department that you did hear good things about from a political angle?

Notre Dame, U Mass, and a few others. And I hear consistently bad things about the U. of C. Most are a bit faceless.

with stras you're guaranteed the same opinion every time: if a Clinton's for it, she's against it. Including universal health care and Social Security.

What? Link to the comment where I opposed universal health care and social security, JRoth.

Well, you came out in favor of Obama's non-universal plan over HRC's universal plan. No one who actually knows jack-shit about the subject believes that Obama's plan will cover more people than HRC's, or be in any other way "universal." QED.

Furthermore, despite a lot of people who clearly knew the facts better than you do telling you otherwise, you insisted that Obama's threaten-SS plan was desirable. Why did you insist on the point so? I have trouble ascribing it to anything other than your amply-demonstrated kneejerk anti-Clintonism (example of the latter? Stating, without qualification, that Bill Clinton was just as culpable, if not more so, as GWB on the subject of torture; if you don't see a difference between WLC's bad policies on the topic and GWB's, then I have to conclude that you are blinded by Clinton hatred).

Oh, but wait: you didn't state it in explicit terms in a single comment, so no link. I guess you win.

Well, you came out in favor of Obama's non-universal plan over HRC's universal plan

No, I explicitly came out in favor of single-payer health care - not on offer by any leading candidate - and predicted that a mandate-based plan, as proposed by both Clinton and Edwards, would fail because it would require draconian enforcement mechanisms (collection agencies, wage garnishment) that would be both bad policy and horrible politics, sending the plan down in flames as the '94 plan did. If you want more details on why I think this is the case, you can actually read what I fucking wrote instead of making shit up about what I think.

you insisted that Obama's threaten-SS plan was desirable

Again, link to the comment where I said I wanted to "threaten Social Security." What I endorsed - and for the umpteenth time, this is a policy also endorsed by Paul Krugman, John Edwards, and a ton of center-left economists - is raising the cap on the payroll tax. This isn't a crazy radical right scheme to destroy the welfare state; it's a standard-issue liberal fix for a possible SS shortfall, and it's been held forth as an explicitly liberal counter to conservative proposals since anyone's ever been talking about potential SS shortfalls. I've already been through this in a mind-numbingly long and repetitive 400-plus comment thread, but the few commenters who were opposed to the idea on the merits weren't opposed to it because it "threatened Social Security." Jesus.

I don't know why you get a bug up your ass every time I post about politics, but it really is pretty tiring.

Salon writer Edward Shapiro is not above stealing a neat idea from Atrios:

Edwards and Clinton are both playing traditional roles in the never-ending political drama of the outsider versus the insider. Obama is the wild card, as the 21st-century candidate trying to rewrite the equations that govern political math.