AlchemyToday

Apparently, the surest evidence of suspending one’s Presidential campaign and reaching across the aisle is by arriving in Washington, DC with your campaign manager (a financial industry lobbyist) and meeting with these guys:

“McCain left his office and took the subway to the capitol. He is now in Minority Leader John Boehner’s office with Sens. Jon Kyl, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman. [Campaign manager] Rick Davis was on the subway with McCain but I don’t know if he went into Boehner’s office.”

If you’re keeping score at home, that’s three Republcan congressman and an independent (who happens to be a co-chair of McCain’s campaign).  Remeber: the first step in sidestepping partisan gridlock is huddling with your team and figuring out your strategy for entering negotations.

Update: McCain will be assisted by a campaign aide tonight at his White House meeting; Obama will be accompanied by his Senate counsel.  Who else came to DC with McCain after suspending his campaign besides Rick Davis and Doug Holtz-Eatkin?

From McCain’s leaked talking points yesterday:

John McCain is calling on the President to convene a meeting with the leadership of both houses of Congress, including himself and Senator Obama.

From George Bush’s remarks last night:

There is a spirit of cooperation between Democrats and Republicans and between Congress and this administration. In that spirit, I’ve invited Senators McCain and Obama to join congressional leaders of both parties at the White House tomorrow to help speed our discussions toward a bipartisan bill.

Leaving aside the fact that neither Senator McCain nor Senator Obama is in a leadership position in Congress, the only explanations for McCain and Bush’s statements are:

1. Collusion between them
2. One is lying
3. Coincidence

Can’t imagine what it might be.

I’ve seen a number of folks make comments along the lines of, “What does McCain mean by suspending his campaign?  He still had an interview on CBS, is speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative, and met with Lady Lynn de Rothschild yesterday… what parts of his campaign are suspended?”

Fair point, but it misses what’s really indicated by this apparent inconsistency: it’s clear that McCain first seriously considered and then decided on this course of action within a maximum of 7 hours.  My proof assumes that the McCain campaign operates in a logically coherent manner respecting some self-evident rules of running a campaign, which might be overgenerous.  First, the relevant timeline:

1. McCain releases two web ads unrelated to the economy yesterday (picture from JohnMcCain.com at 8:34AM 9/25):
   
2. McCain’s campaign held a conference call to discuss an ABC News poll at 10:30AM yesterday.
3. McCain met with Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild sometime after 8:30AM yesterday.
4. McCain proposed the campaign suspension to Obama at 2:30PM yesterday.
5. McCain announces campaign suspension at 5:30PM yesterday.

Under the assumption that McCain’s campaign is not completely broken, it should be a rule that, when considering totally suspending your campaign on the basis of finishing a bill to forestall economic disaster, you would avoid events unrelated to said economic meltdown.  There are three documented activities yesterday by McCain, McCain’s ad team, and McCain’s polling/press staff above that are completely unrelated to the Wall St. bailout.

Based on these observations, it’s clear that neither McCain nor his press/polling/advertising operations were seriously considering the prospect of a campaign suspension until after 10:30AM yesterday.  This means that, in the absence of any earth shaking developments in the financial markets, McCain started considering and then decided on this path within just a few hours.  I understand that McCain prides himself on being decisive, but there’s a better word for his actions yesterday: rash.

It’s simply mind-blowing to think that our next President could be so totally unprepared in a situation that’d been developing for weeks at least (Obama’s been consistent on this for years, but let’s ignore that for now).  The President needs contingency plans to be ready to spring into action for a billion different things, and the McCain campaign’s off-the-wall, incoherent response here is really startling.  McCain was clearly operating through the first half of yesterday under the assumption that he was  campaigning as usual and then completely reversed course with zero intervening events of note.  If McCain were President today and had given the speech that George Bush gave last night, there’d be an odds on chance that he’d show up on TV tonight and announced TVA 2.0 to drag us out of depression, or announce an end to the bailout and the beginning of survival of the fittest on Wall St. — who knows?

I just found out about (and rode) the until-now-secret-to-me 32-minute MARC from DC’s Union Station to Baltimore’s Penn (7:21AM – 7:53A; right on schedule).  I suspect that this train exists for the purpose of quickly returning a MARC car to the other end of the line for another rush-hour return trip, but it seems that putting a small train on a similarly fast route in the the other direction would increase interest in Baltimore City living (and having another run at night for the return commute).  It’s 15-20 minutes off the normal ride, but I think that’d make the difference in the feasibility of a commute with additional transport tacked onto either end.

McCain today in Green Bay, WI:

Senator Obama has simply not given Americans good reason to trust him with your tax dollars. My opponent is against lowering taxes on businesses which are the second highest in the world. He will impose mandated health insurance on businesses that would cost up to $12,000 per employee. He opposes free trade. He also wants to take away the fundamental right of workers to have a secret ballot when voting to be part of a union. Now is not the time for these destructive policies that will cripple business growth, destroy jobs and hurt the middle class.

Any constitutional scholars want to weigh in on that one?  I understand the faux moral outrage ginned up by Republicans about open unionization ballots, but, really, a fundamental right?

This puts the privacy of your vote to unionize on par, in John McCain’s view, with the right to life, your right to bear arms, and workers’ “right to know when their jobs, pensions, IRAs, investments, and our whole economy are being put at risk by the recklessness of Wall Street.”  Not included in McCain’s list of fundamental rights (assuming that by fundamental he means rights logically extended to all humans and not just all Americans, which fits in with his use of the term “fundamental right” so far) is the right to medical privacy and the right to petition for a writ of habeas corpus:

We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called, quote, Habeas Corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material.

Too bad Obama’s gonna raise capital gains taxes… we’ll see how that massive buzz kill goes over in this economy.  Oh wait, what capital gains?

Here’s my latest shot at it from the new Tax Policy Center data:

This is essentially the same presentation used by Viveka at chartjunk except I’ve obviously used updated 2012 data instead of old 2009 data (biggest difference: includes sunsetting of some Bush tax cuts), inverted the x/y axes to make it more intuitive, and gotten rid of unneccesary (and inherently subjective) annotation.  Of course, it’s a subjective call to use the Tax Policy Center’s current law baseline instead of the tax-cuts-extended baseline, but I think it’s a fairer baseline since either candidate would face an uphill battle getting the Bush tax cuts extended and it still treats both candidates equally.

Putting aside whether it’s true or not that Obama pressured the Iraqi Foreign Minister to delay working out troop withdrawal agreements until either he or McCain get into office, this is a stunning bit of hypocrisy from Randy Scheunemann:

“At this point, it is not yet clear what official American negotiations Senator Obama tried to undermine with Iraqi leaders, but the possibility of such actions is unprecedented. It should be concerning to all that he reportedly urged that the democratically-elected Iraqi government listen to him rather than the US administration in power,” he said. “If news reports are accurate, this is an egregious act of political interference by a presidential candidate seeking political advantage overseas. Senator Obama needs to reveal what he said to Iraq’s Foreign Minister during their closed door meeting. The charge that he sought to delay the withdrawal of Americans from Iraq raises serious questions about Senator Obama’s judgment and it demands an explanation.”

This is the McCain advisor most responsible for McCain’s rhetoric re: Georgia last month, in which, by any measure, McCain went well above his station as Senator or candidate for President to converse directly with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, give speech after speech with far more aggressive tones than those coming out of the White House, threatened to kick Russia out of the G-8, etc.

Tip of the hat to Ezra for noticing this, and agreed that their method of redirection back to the Internet via PDF is more than a little obfuscated, but I suppose that sort of thing doesn’t generally sound alarm bells in the minds of tax experts.

Here’s a new way of looking at the distribution of tax cuts under the new analysis (no new tables for sample tax payers, so no updates to ObamaTaxCut).

And, yes, using the 2012 estimates instead of the 2009 estimates would get rid of the top-quintile tax increase for Obama and reflect better on his plan, but I’m trying to be honest here.