Bill and Hillary Clinton went to bat for Barack and Joe today in Scranton, PA. The first video is a mash-up of Hillary's speech introducing Joe and a bit of Joe's. Watch it:

I have to say, I love that here we are in October and the rhetoric is as partisan as though it were primary season. This year the Democrats have learned the virtues of turning out the base, not running for the mushy middle and obscuring the differences between the two parties in hopes they'll be acceptable to the most people.

About freakin time.

This exchange on This Week today addressed this most welcome 2008 election phenomenon:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Both candidates ended up running some version of a turn out the base election. It just so happens that this year the Democratic base is much bigger than the Republican base.

GEORGE WILL: The Republicans do that because it's what they know how to do; the Democrats do it now because it's in their advantage.

PAUL KRUGMAN: I was critical of Obama early on for this notion that we were going to be bi-partisan, it wasn't going to happen...

STEPHANOPOULOS: You wanted a base election...

KRUGMAN: ...and here it is.

This next video is Hillary giving what is becoming the line of her stump speech:

What else is going on?

This weekend, I've been dissecting a selection of essays from Dispatches from the Religious Left, an anthology edited by Frederick Clarkson examining the vision and methods of the Religious Left. The book includes a brief chapter on new media, which my wife and I co-wrote.  This weekend's discussion included a look at PastorDan's essay on the role of the Religious Left, Rev. Deb Haffner and Timothy Palmer's essay on a theology of sexual justice, and Frederick Clarkson's essay on electoral politics and the Religious Left.  It's been a wide-ranging and fascinating discussion, and I've learned a great deal.  I hope you've enjoyed it as well.

If you're in New York this week, please join us for more in-depth, in-person discussion of these essays, and many others in the book.  We will be launching the book and, hopefully, a larger, ongoing discussion about the shape and vision of the Religious Left:

Tuesday, October 14, 2008
7:00pm - 10:00pm
Middle Collegiate Church
50 East 7th St., New York, NY
RSVP: http://www.new.facebook.com/event.php?ei d=25908349317

Fred Clarkson has more, but here's the short take: you won't want to miss a book launch featuring a famous gospel choir.

I hope to see you there!

Schadenfreude.

scha·den·freu·de [shahd-n-froi-duh]

-noun

satisfaction or pleasure felt at someone else's misfortune.

Republicans are concerned. Very very concerned. This New York Times article is a satisfying read for everyone who's gotten way too used to its always being the Democrats who fret about the listlessness of our candidate's campaign in the final weeks.

"I think you're seeing a turning point," said Saul Anuzis, the Republican chairman in Michigan, where Mr. McCain has decided to stop campaigning. "You're starting to feel real frustration because we are running out of time. Our message, the campaign's message, isn't connecting."

Tommy Thompson, a Republican who is a former governor of Wisconsin, said it would be difficult for Mr. McCain to win in his state but not impossible, particularly if he campaigned in conservative Democratic parts of the state. Asked if he was happy with Mr. McCain's campaign, Mr. Thompson replied, "No," and he added, "I don't know who is."

In Pennsylvania, Robert A. Gleason Jr., the state Republican chairman, said he was concerned that Mr. McCain's increasingly aggressive tone was not working with moderate voters and women in the important southeastern part of a state that is at the top of Mr. McCain's must-win list.

"They're not as susceptible to attack ads," Mr. Gleason said. "I worry about the southeast. Obama is making inroads."

Several party leaders said Mr. McCain needed to settle on a single message in the final weeks of the campaign and warned that his changing day-to-day dialogue -- a welter of evolving economic proposals, mixed with on-again-off-again attacks on Mr. Obama's character -- was not breaking through and was actually helping Mr. Obama in his effort to portray Mr. McCain as erratic.

"The main thing he needs to do," said Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota, "is focus on a single message -- a single, concise or clear-cut message, and stick with that over the next 30 days, regardless of what happens.

"He's had a lot of attack lines. But it's time to choose."

John C. Danforth, a retired Republican senator from Missouri, said Mr. McCain should turn his attention mainly to drawing contrasts with Mr. Obama and "essentially go back to the basics."

"I don't think it's enough to talk about earmarks incessantly," Mr. Danforth said. "He's made that point. You've got to get beyond that and talk about the very dramatic taxes and spending in the Obama program."

You'll notice that most of these comments are couched in advice for John McCain...what he can do to turn things around. But not all Republicans are willing to pretend they think that's even possible. On the heels of David Brooks's reportedly calling the election for Obama, now Ed Rollins uses the L-word.

Former Reagan political adviser Ed Rollins likened today's landscape to that in 1980, when voters were angry at President Jimmy Carter and the Democrats and turned to Reagan in droves once they felt comfortable with the idea of him as president.

"Barack has met the threshold," Rollins said. "Once Reagan met the threshold, people wanted to get rid of Carter and they did in a landslide. This is going to turn into a landslide."

But perhaps most satisfying of all is to see one of the co-founders of RedState, Joshua Trevino, decide, in the end, that he just couldn't bring himself to vote for John McCain (h/t fogiv):

Finally, the vote for President of the United States: an academic exercise in California, where Barack Obama will surely win by a crushing margin. But good citizenship demands voting as if it matters. Do I believe in John McCain? Not as much as I used to. Do I believe in Sarah Palin? Despite my early enthusiasm for her, now not at all. Do I believe in the national Republican Party? Not in the slightest -- even though I see no meaningful alternative to it. So, my choice for President in 2008, scrawled in my ballot as an act of futile protest, is Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana.

OK, that's your schadenfreude break for the day. Now, get back to work.

On Thursday the folks at First Read asked who would sell out whom first, John McCain or the Republican leadership.

*** Checks and balances: Considering the state of the Republican ticket right now (not just McCain, but congressional Republicans too), which will come first: McCain beginning to campaign as the Republican check on Nancy Pelosi's power or congressional Republicans beginning to campaign as the Republican check on Barack Obama?

According to Politico's Jonathan Martin, we now have an answer to this questio:

Implying that the GOP won't win back either the House or Senate, two McCain backers this morning sounded out a new talking point by raising the specter of Democrats in control of both the Congress and White House.

[...]

The comments, almost certainly coordinated, would seem to signal a new phase of the campaign.

Few believe the GOP has any chance to reclaim either chamber of Congress. But many in the party have sought to keep a brave public face on their prospects. Now, with under a month until Election Day, McCain's campaign has apparently decided that there is more political benefit in pressing the importance of divided government than pretending the GOP can reclaim the House or Senate.

We'll have to wait and see how well this reasoning works on voters. Certainly, it has the potential to drive a wedge within the Republican Party -- both within the elites and among the base -- as the party sees its presidential nominee selling out the party's congressional leadership (we all remember how well it worked for the GOP in the 1948 election when the selling out went in the other direction). Possibly it could sway some independent voters wary of too centralized of power (though whether this argument is actually persuasive is not at all apparent to me; just because voters often elect a divided government doesn't mean they do so intentionally). Almost undoubtedly it will not be enough to fundamentally change the direction of the election.

Here are today's numbers:

	Obama	McCain
Diageo/Hotline	49	41
Gallup	50	43
Rasmussen Reports	51	45
Research 2000/dKos	53	40
Average:	50.75	42.25

Again today there appears to be slight movement, though the overall average looks much the same as it has for more than two weeks, with Barack Obama pulling in between 49.25 and 51.25 percent of the vote and John McCain pulling in between 41.75 and 43.00 percent. The last 15 days, in fact, have been among the most calm in the polling during the general election, with very little, if any, real movement in the national polling (even as the state-by-state polling has caught up and Obama has jumped to a major electoral college lead). None of this is good for the McCain campaign.

Feel free to consider this a thread on the state of the race, as well as a general open thread... What's on your mind?

The longer we delay fixing the health care system - reigning in costs, covering everyone, and fairly sharing risk - the harder it will be to reform the system at all. And it's not just because America is currently facing, in the words of just about everyone, "the largest economic crisis since the Great Depression." As David Lightman and Kevin G. Hall point out today in McClatchy Newspapers, the simple demographics will be against us if we wait:

Beginning in 2011, the first wave of baby boomers - Americans born between 1946 and 1964 - will reach official retirement age. From that point forward, the federal government's finances will be strained, as more and more Americans retire expecting a shrinking number of active workers to pay their promised health and pension benefits.

To put it more starkly: Medicare's trustees project the hospital insurance fund will become insolvent in about 10 years, as its expenditures grow at a 7.4 percent annual rate. The government, the trustees said, will need $342 billion to cover insurance costs during that period.

...

"The longer action on reforming health care and Social Security is delayed, the more painful and difficult the choices will become," said a Government Accountability Office study in June. "The federal government faces increasing pressures, yet a shrinking window of opportunity for phasing in adjustments."

Medicare, the report said, "represents a much larger, faster-growing and more immediate problem than Social Security."

A series of factors are driving up Medicare costs. According to the GAO and the trustees, medical technology is often overused; the health care market doesn't operate on a supply-and-demand basis as people often don't shop for the lowest price; and chronic health problems - such as obesity or substance abuse - require expensive, lengthy treatment.

Medicare (and similarly, Medicaid) face such staggering budget shortfalls to a large extent as a consequence of America's private, patchwork health care system. Preventative care is less costly in the long run, yet, because the health insurance industry has been so deregulated as to allow them to deny care at every opportunity and price care out of the reach of millions, America has 47 million uninsured and millions more under-insured. This means millions of Americans don't see their doctor as regularly as they should to catch medical problems early before they become costly emergencies. And, as the economy sinks, people are cutting back on care, making the problem worse.

Medicare (and to some extent, Medicaid) functions essentially as a high risk pool, a group of people (in this case, the elderly) who are less profitable to insurance companies because they use so much health care. High risk pools, basically by definition, don't work. If the theory of insurance is to spread out risk (everyone in a system all pay into a pot so when one person needs to use their coverage, that cost can be absorbed by everyone), then high risk pools make no sense. Putting everyone who you know are going to use a lot of health insurance into the same pot and asking them to share costs is silly - there are no "low risk" people in the system to absorb some of the cost. And because everyone at some time in their life is "high risk" for large health insurance costs (everyone eventually gets sick or old), Medicare functions as a dumping ground for the private insurance industry. Private insurance takes monthly premiums from the young and healthy all their life, and when they get old and sick (and unprofitable), they are dumped on the government.

This is why Medicare is projected to be the largest driver of the national debt in the near future, and, because baby boomers are about to enter the system in huge numbers, this is why health reform needs to happen in this country immediately.

Simply getting everybody covered adequately would be a huge step forward. A guarantee of a certain level of care, no matter if you're on private or public insurance plans, would make sure people receive the care they need throughout their life, lowering overall costs. A subsidized public insurance plan that would take everybody would go a long way towards eliminating the number of people in America without insurance. And regulating all insurance plans - public and private - to make sure they cover pre-existing conditions and can't dump "unprofitable" customers would ensure risk is shared fairly, as it is meant to be.

This, of course, is Health Care for America Now's vision, shared by 83 Members of Congress, including Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Contrast that with the conservative vision, championed by John McCain:

• Less regulation on insurance companies to do away with state based insurance, allowing companies to set up shop in the states with the least regulation and forcing Americans to shop on their own for health insurance.
• Taxing your employee health benefits, doing away with the employer-based system
• Funding a paltry tax credit (which goes straight to the insurance industry) with cuts to Medicare and Medicaid

No guarantee of care, no incentive to promote prevention, no fair risk sharing, and a plan that is estimated to grow the ranks of the uninsured in America by 5 million in just five years.

There is a clear difference here, and that's why it's so important to make health care a priority in this election and immediately after the next president is inaugurated. It seems the nation is waking up to that difference, too. In the past few weeks, health care has been a focus of some excellent debate questions, it has been targeted in campaign advertisements, and the subject of numerous news stories. And of course, Health Care for America Now has thrown our hat into the ring, spending $4.3 million to put advertisements about John McCain's health care plan (as well as 7 congressional candidates) on the air across the country:

America is finally having the health care debate it needs to be having. What's at stake is our economy, our national debt, our health, and our happiness. Let's just hope the urgency is still there in January.

Over at the Washington Monthly's Political Animal blog, Hilzoy had a great comment on news that John McCain may soon propose "economic measures aimed directly at the middle class" such as "tax cuts -- perhaps temporary -- for capital gains and dividends":

Because what everyone is really worried about right now is how they'll manage to pay the taxes on their massive capital gains.

The biggest surprise for me this year is how poor a campaign McCain has run since locking up the Republican nomination.

This is an open thread on the dumbest policy idea or campaign tactic McCain has come up with in recent months.

Dave in MA threw out some ideas in this diary earlier today.

Although McCain had no great VP options, in my opinion, I still think choosing Sarah Palin was among his biggest mistakes.

UPDATE: The New York Times reports,

Despite signals that Senator John McCain would have new prescriptions for the economic crisis after a weekend of meetings, his campaign said Sunday that Mr. McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, would not have any more proposals this week unless developments call for some.

There's a winning message! Everyone who doesn't think that current developments call for some economic policy proposals, please raise your hands.

The book launch for Dispatches from the Religious Left is coming up on Tuesday, Oct. 14.  In anticipation of the event, I'm running a series this weekend on a few essays from the book.  Yesterday I wrote about PastorDan's essay on the role of the Religious Left (PastorDan responded here), as well as Rev. Debra Haffner and Timothy Palmer's essay on a theology of sexual justice.

The third part of the book is dedicated to "getting from here to there", and is a bit more nuts-and-bolts-oriented than the first two parts.  It includes the essay my wife and I wrote on new media, which focuses on helping religious organizations find their voice online.  However, since that material is probably pretty familiar to many blog readers, I'm instead going to focus on the contribution by Frederick Clarkson (who is also the editor of the book), titled "Three wheels that need not be reinvented".

Fred's main argument is that the Religious Left must get more involved in electoral politics.  By way of contrast he points to the Religious Right, which actively participates in party primaries, registers voters, and maintains high-quality voter lists that persist from one cycle to another.  All of these ingredients help the Right exert power far beyond its numbers, and Clarkson argues that the Left must respond in kind in order to realize its vision.  His chapter profiles three progressive political organizations in Massachusetts, and offers them as organizing models for Religious Leftists.

Join me across the flip for a discussion of these organizations, and the kinds of things the Religious Left will need to do in order to build cross-cyclical electoral power.