Rick Perry loosens up in New Hampshire and creates a candid picture of what kind of governor and leader he is. It is personable, focused, matter-of-fact Texas conservatism.  The Texas Tribune remarks that this is an unusually enlivened governor.   The debate format of seven people and a few moments to sparkle is not for Perry.  Is it time for Perry to make his move?  The Herman Cain phenomenon is not sturdy.  The damaging smear these hours is that Cain harassed two women when he was president of the Restaurant Association, and they are forbidden by the settlement to speak.  Not a happy narrative, and clearly politics of personal destruction.  Will it work?  Cain's early response to the tale, which is now in the New York Times blog, is to bait the questioner, "Have you ever been accused sexual harassment?" Not shrewd, Mr. Cain. (This snarkiness followed a trivial performance on CBS "Face the Nation" in defense of the Mark Block smoking inanity on video.)  Who stands to gain from a Cain stumble?  Rick Perry.  Who is asking for a second look from pollsters and voters?  Rick Perry.  Can Cain survive a full-scale harassment smear?  Unknown, but no one much can.   Matching Perry with Romney for the Iowa caucus makes good sense, as each represents a version of the GOP: Perry the hard right; and Romney the soft center.  Neither the aged Ron Paul nor the aging Newt Gingrich will overtake these two vigorous, surging governors; and the Bachmann-Santorum duet is small beer.  Cain's slip is Perry's step up

.   

Spoke Dan Henninger, WSJ, re the general observation that the Republican debates have failed to convey a sober, substantive, recognizable brief of the candidates. Instead, we are witness to a frantic puppet show of tepid gotcha and repetitive banalities. It does resemble Dancing with the Candidates, each with a costume, a pose, a distinctive phrase, to impress an imaginary judge.   The Herman Cain video by campaign manager Mark Block introduced self-conscious farce into an already insipid competition.  Block is identified afterward as a vain scamp who has played loose with rules and personal behavior over the years.   In response, Jon Huntsman's quick daughters mock Block and Cain and perhaps the whole process of pretentious, shallow, cynical, deceptive palaver.  Ron Paul's arch cartoonishness is matched by Santorum's rudeness, Bachmann's petulance, Perry's sluggishness, and so forth.  The old phrase for this deterioration of a plot line was "jumping the shark."  The new phrase may be something like "going Republican."  Mention that Gingrich and Cain plan a two-man, for-profit Tea Party event in Texas that aims to resemble a Lincoln and Douglas debate.  No TV planned at this time.  Is this for-profit campaigning?  Dan Henninger observes that there is no restriction on the candidates to stage their own debates away from the networks and cables that favor miniaturized spectacle.  If Perry challenges Romney to a ninety-minute dialogue about their visions for the party and the nation, about their opinion of the last years of turmoil, it would be well-attended and well-covered.  Why not?  Who deputized FNC, MSNBC or CNN to define Republicanism 2012?  At this pace, we can anticipate Foghorn Cleghorn creating YouTube mashup videos for Newt:  "Look, sister, is any of this filterin' through that little blue bonnet of yers?"

  

What I read and hear about the euro deal is that the leader of the French, Nicolas Sarkozy, now sends an emissary, Klaus Regling, with a cup in hand to beg China and Brazil and other rich countries to contribute the the rescue fund needed to back the banks that will otherwise fail because of the deal. What makes the begging especially choice is that China's banks are frail to failed, and that only China's foreign currency reserve, which can't be converted to yuan easily, makes it look to be a cash cow. The Chinese banks are trillions of dollars' short and have little hope of recovering the loans they have forced into the economy since 2008. Meanwhile, Chinese manufacturers are reneging on their loans and fleeing or otherwise blaming countries like Vietnam for stealing their business. Gordon Chang tells me that, passing through Hong Kong, he spied an unusually small supply of containers waiting for shipping -- meaning that the food chain of exports is weakening. All this comes back to the trouble with Greece. The world banking system is a colossal tangle of promises and wishes and wagers. The slowdown in Europe that must follow the austerity budgets of Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal places additional pressure on banks already in failure. Laughter. Gargantuan Ponzi. Spoke Satyajit Das in Australia who calls the European rescue plan of the euro a "magical pudding." Wonderful.  Meanwhile, POTUS campaigns by blaming the rich, the GOP, the elites, the banks, the non-Obama supporters, for the mess we're in.  Peggy Noonan calls him the Great Divider.  More to my mind is that he is the Great Obvious.

Am reading the Walter Issacson biographical tribute to Steve Jobs, an overwhelmingly researched and matter-of-fact Time Magazine version of the World According to Steve Jobs and Friends that is routinely fascinating and easy reading. Jobs was a many-sided man, but the side that dominates is a self-authored man with a mission to dominate the Apple concept. The story provides lots of room for interpretation, and the details that compel are the birth, adoption, alienation, indifference and serendipitous rediscovery of his birth mother and father and the sister he never knew he had until he was in his thirties. Of note, I am reading the book on my iPad1 after it was sent to me on launch day form Amazon's Kindle version.  Great fun, and easy to scan for key words so that you get to the hard stuff.  I used the word "death" to search.   I can see now that the Apple success since 1997 was built on Jobs's understanding that the world of PCs needed design more than it needed utility.  Also, that every generation of young people who can spend mom's and dad's money will buy what plays music and talks to other pals.  Simple consumer insight: kids like each other.  Good for Apple.  The human bits, about how acquiring great wealth is bad for poetry, romance, anger management, paranoia, proportion, is a twice-told tale.  See Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Morgan, Westinghouse, Rockefeller, Ford, Mellon and so forth Citizen Kanes.  The romance parts are swift, embarrassing, creepy, sad, until we reach Laurene Powell, the widow, who is a major-league Goldman Sachs femme fatale veteran who reeled Jobs in with the graceful, winning, capable genius of the executive class.  Powell organized Jobs to the point that, when the preposterous NeXt failed, he was confident enough to return to Apple for the Silicon Valley rescue of the new century.  What I admire about Jobs is that he managed his return so well that he was free to go ahead to eternity before most of the rest of us who follow in step.  But not yet

Striking and suggestively post-modern new video from Herman Cain campaign featuring Mark Block, 57, the campaign COO, who brandishes a cigarette off at the close of his understated, obvious remarks.  Also striking announcement that the TExas Tea PArty will sponsor a Lincoln-Douglas debate in Texas between Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich, no TV yet provided.  With Cain ahead in Iowa by 37 % over Romney and the distant Perry, it is strange to learn that Cain has no team on the ground in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, according to Swampland.  Is the Cain campaign a Frank Capra production, Meet Herman Cain?  And what is the pay-off?  The above video suggests mortality to me.  Cain's campaign against Washington is well proportioned, but his funding, staffing and travels suggest show business and the genius of a Hollywood scale prankster.

POTUS Obama throws out a gesture to his partisans by announcing the withdrawal of all US troops in Iraq by year's end. The Kurds will dig in and do fine. Baghdad is now under the boot of Tehran. POTUS aims to get the US troops out of Afghanistan also, but 2014 if he is still in office. The US exit from the Middle East creates the vacuum that Riyadh will battle Tehran to fill.  Reports arrive that Maliki blocked a transitionary force, because he bows to the Tehran stooge Sadr.  The battle lines in the ummah are drawn sharply.  Tehran-Baghdad-Damascus-Beirut will fight to the death with Cairo-Riyadh-Amman-Ankara.  The Neo-Ottomans arise with Europe at their right hand and Tehran at their left.  The US is out of the region as a power.  Russia can and will fill the vacuum. For the moment, Baghdad falls again, this time to the Shi'a confederation.  Mission accomplished for Tehran.  The Sunni confederation fights back at Syria.  The US is not consulted.

Reported to Mary Kissel that Gaddafi's ugly death at the hands of a gun-toting, blood-thirsty and sloppy mob is the end of an outlaw -- who used his own irrational, unpredictable behavior for forty years to rule by terror and whim -- and the beginning of a lurch to sharia tyranny and self-defeat for the whole of North Africa. Cairo is a military dictatorship that will share power with shariah law bullies. Tripoli is ruled by the Jibril clan, all of whom are Cyrenaica jihadists. The largest state of the Maghreb, Algeria, is frail, aimless, in the hands of a dying dictator, on the edge of civil war again. And so on. There will be more blood. My information is that the US has no part in the ruin. The US is leaving the region, from Kabul to Baghdad to Cairo, and what comes next is a power vacuum to be filled by one of the three competing forces, the neo-Ottomans of Ankara; the neo-Salafists of the Arabian Peninsula; or the neo-Mahdists of Tehran. Another way of thinking about the battle that is now being played out on the surrogate field of Syria is that the East-West axis of Shi'a (Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut) is locked in combat with the North-South axis of Sunni (Ankara, Amman, Riyadh, Cairo). It is a thousand-year-old struggle. This time the players have major weapons systems, up to nukes. The US and Europe are sideline characters. It is an Islamic reformation, and just like the Christian Reformation, it will be ruthless, delusional, spontaneous and suicidal.

Spoke Sudeep Reddy, WSJ, with Larry Kudlow, and learn that the showdown in Europe is set for Sunday October 23, when the Finance Ministers will roll out a plan to solve the trouble with Greece and guarantee the assets of the European banks. This may all work, but Sudeep Reddy opines that it will take some time, into 2012, before the turmoil eases. The euro may be saved, but not with all 17 countries still in the eurozone. Greece can be refinanced; however, the markdown in Greek bonds means that many banks now feeling solvent will be troubled. The fear is that the cascade will continue to the Italian and Spanish and Portugese bonds, and that will pull down major players. What does it matter to the US? The exposure of American banks ranges from $150 B to $700 B. The longer-term worry is that the austerity budgets in Europe will drag Europe into recession this winter, and that America will follow in a global contraction.  #OWS may be on the eve of another leg down in job losses and housing price declines.  Sleeping in the park may not be voluntary for the breakdown.  What is to be done?  Wait on October 23, and then figure the markets will game the uncertainties.  POTUS Obama is all certain now -- he will pontificate about the rich, and about jobs for teachers and fireman, and he will do little more than stoke the wide unhappiness, because his game is to re-elect himself with the tactics of agitation and blame-shifting  

"@ThomasRHart: Quote of the Day: "The best and brightest of my generation are bagging your groceries" #OWS"

Athens demo.

Spoke Larry Kudlow and James Taranto, WSJ, re the Herman Cain aggressive tax plan, 9-9-9, and learned that Steve Moore now believes that the Cain plan is badly flawed. The 9% sales tax is wrong. The criticism by Mitt Romney in the Las Vegas debate was accurate. The national sales tax added to the state taxes, without deductions, will mean that the taxes for the majority will rise. Steve Moore told this to Larry on Saturday, and said he would pass on the facts to Herman Cain (Moore is an advisor). However, after tonight's debate, it appears that Steve Moore did not reach the candidate for the correction; or, if he did, Cain did not heed the warning.  The adjustment makes this plan unlikely, since it would now be 9-9-0-plus.  The pummeling Cain took on 9-9-9 may be the end of his boom.  Cain is popular and nimble.  The adjustments of the plan will require footwork.  Will Cain bother?  Mitt Romney ignored Cain in order to trade fisticuffs with Rick Perry.  This was Perry's best debate by far, though he did not persuade that he is ready for the election.   Mitt Romney remains the man for all platforms, the best-disciplined and most-resourceful character to face off with POTUS.  Romney is not exciting, fast or convincing.  However, POTUS continues to run against the GDP, not the GOP, and the bank earnings disappointments point to continued uncertainty in the regime.  Romney's best case is that he respects markets and will promote growth, not class grievances, nor gender, nor religious and regional prejudices.

The Dog Not Barking.  

The worldwide coordination of protesters, across the US, then connected to Taipei and European capitals such as Rome and Madrid, follows the Arab Spring protests of last winter and spring across the Mideast and North Africa. What is starkly striking is the dog that is not barking. Nothing in China in the way of street protest against capitalism; nothing in Russia against capitalism; nothing much in India against capitalism (there is an auto plant wildcat strike outside Delhi).   In the three most powerful countries that remain hobbled by Marxist-Leninism, no protestst. In have no one interpretation. The West and the democracies are doing just fine: a display of young people protesting inequities and indecision by the ruling heads is healthy and necessary in the next phase of crony capitalism -- perhaps a tad less crony and a tad more capital friendly? The grotesque vandal behavior of the last decades of crony capitalism, especially with regard Fannie and Freddie and the banks too big to fail creating the housing bubble in order to plunder the future of the young, requires response, and the young are well equipped to respond digitally and physically.  The tech that provides real time camera feeds from street actions, including sound and cross-cutting and so forth, is a marvel of politics gone global.  Fascinating, and if this had existed in 1789 or 1848 or 1905 or 1917 or 1956 or so forth, what would have come of the genuine risk of plunging into chaos?  Today, it is mostly young people in good weather with impressive numbers pushing politely against mostly disciplined authorities.  The spectacle does add weight to the argument that the governance of the democracies is wanting.  It also illustrates that the governance of the dictatorships is severely out of the picture: (China and Russia and India are crony capitalist to some small degree; North Korea, Cuba and the darkness of the Third World have no connection to crony capitalism).  

Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com.  

The inevitable Romney campaign constructs the clear formula for the next 13 months, POTUS Obama's struggles with the GDP against Mitt Romney's struggles with the GOP.  The revelation this weekend that the new new Obama re-elect campaign strategy is to attack Romney as a tool of Wall Street, to embrace #OWS and lead a children's crusade against the corporate villains who Romney serves, is as despairing as the last two new new strategies: running the 1948 Truman campaign against the Do-Nothing Congress, or running the Rovian 2004 Bush campaign that veered sharply to the partisan base, in Obama's case, to the Progressives and the Democratic interest groups.  The New New #OWS campaign ploy combines these two ambitions into a culturally trendy face of young people facing off against the plutocrats.  It is risky, but then, any strategy is and will be with the GDP flat-lining and the jobless number at 9%.  There is also the problem of overseas violence, such as in Rome and Athens, framing the domestic story into one of lawlessness and anarchy.  Better to bash Romney as Daddy Warbucks and Scrooge.  Silly season.  The winter weather closing in without a payoff will let #OWS go back to class and wait on the Spring.  POTUS is lost in search of a magic wand that will change the direction of the GDP.  Europe's bank crisis is not vulnerable to White House palaver or media polls.  The PIIGS are sinking into recession; they will drag Britain, France and Germany with them. The slowdown already darkens China's growth, and the slowdown is already here in the wariness toward our banks by investor class.  Meantime, the secret of the #OWS is that it does not belong to either party or any candidate -- see live stream from NY Times Square and so forth--, and an attempt to co-opt it will lead to chagrin.  The Zuccotti Park youth, adding the young, college people in Boston, Ann Arbor, Portland, SF and so forth, are ambitious, talented, impatient, iconoclastic, global, curious -- all the attributes they have been taught these last twenty years of expansion into Asia.   Good for them, and time to celebrate their gifts and health.  The election of 2012 is as inconsequential an event in their lives as the election of 1968 is today in mine.  Was Hubert Humphrey the man to change the direction of the country profoundly rather than Richard Nixon?  What's the difference now?  Would Humphrey have made Ronald Reagan more or less likely?  In 1976 or 1980? What fun it is to speculate, and how futile to make conclusive statements on the basis of one election.  POTUS Obama is inadequate for the job.  POTUS Obama is a good campaigner.  The presumption remains that he will win re-election.  Butterfly rules (below) from the #OWS is that even in politics there is whimsy.  The mistake we make about Zuccotti Park is to make more of it than it is, joy for the young who have the strength to sleep in a crate and still make noise the next morning.

 

Wonderful colloquy by world-class European philosophers of the wealth of nations, 31 years apart, but never more on theme. Milton Friedman, 1912-2006, delights an audience with a contrarian's case for greed and capitalism to the speechless though cuddly TV celebrity (Phil D.). Then Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek is helped by the masses to tell a winning story of the absurd cruelty of greed and socialism. The punchline is that we cannot get red ink.  The victory over Bloomberg at Zuccotti PArk, when the NYPD stepped down from confrontation on 10/14/11, marks a turn in the legend not unlike the victory of the mobs of 1789 or 1917 or 1969 over the deployed forces of authority.  There will be flowers in gun barrels.  Spoke David Weidner, WSJ, re the aimless manipulation of celebrities like Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon to push in front of a camera at #OWS.  Predictable hucksterism -- and good for the opportunism tools of the Hollywood star machine to mix in with commoners, but gee, maybe your Personal Assistant is showing and you need to stand back in your lifts and chateaus.  #OWS wins the first phase, the we shall overcome Mayor Mike phase.  Who called Brookfield (the owners of the plush little Zuccotti Park) to warn off the city?  Unnamed politicians?  Note that the AFL-CIO communicated Thursday night that it was in support of the #OWS.  That may be the explanation.  Did the governor get involved?  Andrew Cuomo is head to the White House, and the governor does not much suffer the busy-body billionaire, the mayor.  Delighted to see #OWS continue into another beautiful weekend in fall NYC.  The storms last eve were romantic, filled with lightning like signs from history that these are the good old days. 

 

The #OccupyWallStreet hashtag gains new energy with the adaptation to an acronym, #OWS, and with the change of weather in Washington from outright indifference to calculating opportunism. Can the Democrats find a way to enlist the youth of #OWS into a collective push to re-elect a majority of the 23 Democratic senators up for re-election? Am not convinced that the OFA crowd (that's POTUS re-elect in Chicago) is trying to gain with the #OWS crowd. It seems more competition than working in tandem. Many of the young-people sympathizers are Obama '08 supporters (some were able to vote for Obama '08); however, they look to have the opinion that the president is not the thing this year. This is street theater and a phenomenon of an excellent Indian summer under the Hunter's Moon (below). Good for the young warriors to scramble form class to collective protest. The jobs markets for the classes of 2009-11 are thin and getting worse. The jobs ordinarily open to the young graduates are still held by the old graduates, because the jobs the recent graduates want are still held by the classes of 1999-2004. The collapse of the jobs machine is raw politics. If I were 21, I would #OWS also. Instead, my seniority reminds me that all glory is fleeting; and what remains to be done by those of us still in the economy is to clear up as much as possible of the mess made by the useful idiots in Washington and Wall Street over the last ten years.  Most admire the simplicity and metric accuracy of the Twitter co-occurrence timeline above.  Spoke to John Markoff, NYT, re the use of Web metrics as predictions of future events.  This is a version of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, when Hari Seldon invented psychohistory to discern that the Galactic Empire would collapse into a 30,000-year dark age unless something was done to limit the Dark Age to a mere 1,000 years.  Twitter predicts the future.  Spoke to Robert Lee Hotz, WSJ, to learn that there are studies under way that show Twitter can point to market moves several days early.  Does #OWS predict a future large shift?  Yep.  Those of us at the October Moratorium, 1969, became the ground troops for the Democratic Party revolt in 1972 that produced Bill and Hillary Clinton (below with George McGovern, Little Rock, 1972) as well as Gary Hart. 

Spoke Emily Ramshaw, Texas Tribune, and Taegan Goddard, Political Wire, re the flap over the last days when a pastor in a Dallas megachurch, Robert Jeffress, used the introduction to Rick Perry at the Values Voters Summit in D.C. to declare that Mormonism is a cult and not Christian. Perry's camp (not Perry on stage) swiftly backed away from the Jeffress remark, declaring that Mormonism is not a cult and that Perry "is not in the business of judging people"; rather, that is "God's job."  Taegan Goddard measured that the Perry campaign had achieved both a denunciation of Mormonism as not Christian and a demonstration that Perry is not intolerant.  We spoke of the way Bill Clinton stage-managed the Sister Souljah episode in 1992, by criticizing the rough, divisive language of pop culture in order to illustrate that he was a centrist in the Democratic spectrum.  A two-for-one anecdote to appeal to both sides of the argument.  Perry can retain the evangelical loyalties won in ten years of the governorship and much participation in prayer circles (such as the Prayerapalooza of early August 2011) and also demonstrate the sort of broadmindedness necessary to campaign in the North and West of the country.  The Romney attack ad on healthcare also achieves a two-for-one advantage, linking Mitt Romney with Obama on healthcare and political chicanery.  These are loud and clever attacks on Romney's credibility to lead.  Are they effective?  Perry's surprising weakness, I learn from Emily Ramshaw, is that he has avoided debates the last 20 years of rising in Texas politics.  Perry is an inexperienced debater.  This is a major flaw when it comes to the national election against a skilled and supremely, even pretentiously, confident POTUS.  The GOP must deal with the evidence and choose demonstration rather than aspiration.  A presidential nomination contest is not the right time to learn on the job -- the more so during the rigors of October 2012.  Perry's campaign attacks are guileful.  Perry's stage skills are unreliable.

Celebrity Geraldo Rivera and his sturdy, middle-aged camera crew planted themselves at the edge of the Occupy Wall Street festival on Sunday 9 October and apparently were surprised to meet with disdain from the routinely youthful and hip crowd of college-age protesters. The "Fox News lies!" chanting proved not useful background for the on-air performances. My stroll across Wall Street and to Bowling Green and the Battery was warm, pleasant and not especially political. There was a casual demo following a drummer up Broadway, accompanied by careful NYPD presence and photographed by at least one hundred iPhones. The signs, handmade on cardboard with uneven printing, were entertaining and often obvious, good for the camera and not much use for the audience. The more intriguing aspect of the OWS is that it now spreads to college towns across the country, such as Ann Arbor and Sante Fe and Portland. My sentimental link to the Bowling Green marchers is my memory to the Moratorium demo in Washington, D.C., on October 15, 1969. The newspapers at the time asserted there were half a million young people on the Washington Mall to protest the Vietnam War. We drove down the night before, and the New Jersey Turnpike was overrun with buses of protesters coming from New England schools. It was great fun and well run, and I can recall battalions of young people waving huge red North Korean flags -- and much chanting of slightly out-of-date anti-war proverbs: "Hey, hey, LBJ, NLF is gonna win!" The music was spectacularly raw around the edges of the crowd. I did not realize, as I do now, that this was a once-only moment for the US, with the White House ringed in metro buses as if we were going to storm Richard Nixon. Half a million is an intimidating number for crowd control. There was some ceremonial excitement at various parts of the city, with D.C. police using tear gas, but otherwise I did not see any unhappiness through the day. My memory is that we found our way back to Maryland, where we were staying, and drove back to school. It is a sweet memory, and to my knowledge everyone I saw that day remembers it vividly as collective politics. The war continued five more years. My estimated measure is that the financial crisis will continue five more years, to 2016, when we can reawaken the American economy. Blame Wall Street? Sure. And this is as useful as blaming the Pentagon in 1969.

 

Mitt Romney's succinct foreign policy speech at the Citadel, delivered in a cheerful and less than dramatic, more stentorian style than POTUS Obama can manage with his smoke-deepened baritone, speaks clearly to the theory of American exceptionalism.  The question of if or if not America is unique on the planet -- "citty on a hill" -- is likely to become the major campaign philosophical debate.  The policy stuff of the banks, the markets, the regulators, all will be argued about by panels of thinkers, but the big picture of America as world leader is for the candidates to resolve in debate and in video.  Exceptionalism 2012 is a peculiar turn for the long-confident and strident American population, but here it is, at the end of the Boomer run (Romney likely the last Boomer POTUS, if he makes it).  My reading of American history is that for more than one hundred years, American strength has supported success in the other continents.  POTUS Obama is an unusual c-in-c in that he uses American drone power yet talks as if he is in partnership with our allies.  Clever pretense.  Talk softly and deny the stick in your hand.  Romney sounds to be back to big stick and big talk. 

POTUS aims at Congress, the banks, the millionaires and billionaires, the European plutocrats, the lobbyists, the rascals, at anyone out there or in here (CoS Bill Daley is a banker) who can be blamed for the joblessness, the slowdown, the market turmoil, and especially for the negative poll numbers for the Obama re-elect.  Do we need POTUS to tell us what we have long since reported, that the economy is "weaker now that it was at the beginning of the year"?  Gee.  In sum, POTUS Obama has decided to present himself as a sentimental version of Clifford Odets's 1935 Waiting for Lefty, which is why he speaks in aloof support of the #OccupyWallStreet posse.  (Odets used a 1934 taxi strike in NYC as a vehicle.)  Tradition says you campaign to the Left for Democratic primaries, then you campaign to the center for the general election against the GOP.  POTUS Obama has twisted the formula so that he is campaigning to the left against a divided Congress.  "I want to see Congress act so aggressively that I can't campaign against them, all right, thank you very much everybody."  This is such an obvious, old-fashioned gambit, e.g., Harry Truman in 1948, that it does not need much discussion.  A useful detail, however, is that the GDP turned up in 1947 and into 1948, so that Harry Truman was electioneering into rising expectations.  The opposite is fixed for the Obama re-elect: the Europeans are in a stew over their weak banks that cannot escape the inevitable markdown of the Greek debt -- and this means that 2012 offers a recession in Europe and sluggishness near to recession in the US.  POTUS Obama's offering himself as the candidate as we wait for Lefty does not change the numbers in Europe, where the banks lived off the PIIGS bonds for years even as our banks lived off CDOs and so forth delusional products for years.  Pay the piper.  So why does Obama go Left when it cannot possibly change the picture?  Perhaps because he believes it?  And does the White House "American Jobs Act" represent a Left turn?  Nope.  It is a repeat of the stimulus package that failed in 2009.  POTUS calls Congress "cynical."  What may also be true is that #Obama2012 is casually cynical.  Waiting for Lefty was a romance in the frame of the emergency of 1934 and 1935.  The imprecation "Strike!" was meant to represent collective action to take control of the national dialogue.  POTUS Obama's version in 2011 is "Campaign!" Disappointing in its mildness and obviousness.  Lack of vigor, lack of heart, a long-since-anticipated electioneering strategy.  Re-electing a sentimentally Lefty (not) Obama is a solution? 

  

Leaving the triteness of the GOP nomination well behind, consider new images from Vesta, the mini-me asteroid some 188 million miles out, where NASA bot DAWN is in orbit. This cold grayness is the stuff that Earth is made of, and what a difference timing, location and atmosphere make in the fate of the Solar System. Consider that is what we looked like once upon a time, as Earth is built from the collisions of planetesimals and the Great Bombardment of asteroids and comets some 3.5 to 4 billion years ago. Consider that all this contretemps of the economy and the throne is possible only because of the accidents and logistics of the last half-billion years since the Cambrian explosion of organics and the oxygenating of the oceans and atmosphere.  Eventually, this forbidden mini-me Earth, Vesta, is what the Earth will look like again when our G-type star fades and cools and expands; and the Earth's orbit is consumed with radiation and then coldness.  I favor the long view, since it keeps my eye on the miracle of the once upon a time that is now.  Vesta, keeps me sober, reminds me, Sic transit gloria mundi.

Chris Christie declares repeatedly that he is not ready to run for the Republican presidential nomination, and yet within days of his declarations, the Christie rumors of campaign start again.  Why?  Spoke to Taegan Goddard, Political Wire, and John Avlon, CNN, and learned that Christie answers the doubts of the Northeast GOP, especially the Wall Street hitters.  At no point has Mr. Christie said out loud that he wants to be president. It does matter that you say you are aiming for the White House, and while Christie says a deal, he does not say, "I want to be president someday." Measure the Christie non-boom against the fading Rick Perry boom of just a month past (new low: Perry trails Romney, Cain, and Gingrich in Florida).  The serial hits on Perry these last weeks, since the sorry Orlando, Florida, debate, now include the bizarre story of the hunting camp in Throckmorton County, Texas, that was frequented by the Perry family over many years that did and does contain a flat rock with a racial slur at the entrance.  Spoke Jay Root, Texas Tribune, re the Perry campaign stumbles these last weeks, and particularly with the slow, clumsy, defensive response to the Throckmorton County flap, and learned that much of the trouble recently is what Jay calls "self-inflicted."  The "heartless" remark in Florida, the flubbing of easily handled attack moments in the debate, the hesitancy about the Throckmorton story, all this is the candidate, not the campaign.  Perhaps Perry is overscheduled; perhaps Perry is not ready for prime time.   Then again, it comes to all candidates the first time out that they must deal with surprises, stumbles, the tricks of timing.  Mitt Romney went through this in 2008 and now is stronger for it.  First-time candidates are at a disadvantage.  Wouldn't this be true also if Chris Christie runs?  Yep.

Spoke David Weidner re the Occupy Wall Street demo of earlier, the weekend of September 24 and 25, and commented on the dubious irony that many dozens were going to jail for a Wall Street event, but that as of yet no banker has gone to jail for the TARP-related fiasco of 2008. Yes, Raj Rajaratnam is jailed, and yes, Madoff is jailed; yet this was the usual run-of-the-mill villainy and game-playing, not the major contender stuff of wrecking Fannie and Freddie and the US housing market for a decade and plunging the US into deflationary nightmares. Gee.  Now, with advanced PR and lots more organization, the demonstrators are back, not at Wall Street; rather, on the toney Brooklyn Bridge.  The scene has a sentimental flavor when the ops chant, "The whole world is watching," a choice trope of the famous 1968 Chicago Convention police riot when Mayor RIchard Daley (the elder) unleashed his beefy CPD on hippies, Yippies and other now-legendary cartoon characters.  Gosh, those were the unwired days.  The NYPD face-off with the ops on the Brooklyn Bridge is spirited, ceremonial, careful, tidy, fully video-ready, post-modern, in that the demo is mostly about doing the demo.  It is useful to confirm the demonstration's observation that Wall Street bankers misbehaved and ran riot 2002-2008, and that the remains of the days, including the Great Recession and the Millenial generation delayed in its launch, with the remnant of the Boomers dislocated and threatened.  Still, the demo appears more artful than angry.  Will the plastic handcuffs go on eBay?  How does this relate to the Obama for America operation?  Does Wall Street represent POTUS Obama, or is he a demonstrator-in-chief?  Unknown.  Back in the world of financial panic, the story now is in Europe, where the banks too big to fail are misleading about their exposure to the profligate PIIGS.   The whole world is watching the Greek failure, certain.  As for Wall Street's clever rascals -- colleague Thaddeus McCotter provides the measured verdict, "Too big to jail."

The still-unconfirmed report from Yemen that Anwar al-Awlaki, the New Mexico-born American of Yemeni descent, is KIA in an airstrike (drone) on a motorcade (vehicles on sand) in South Yemen, is an illustration of the futility of the Obama administration just now. Yemen is in civil war: its dictator, Saleh, returned from his hospital bed in Riyadh after suffering burns and trauma from an assassination IED in a mosque last spring; its cities torn by factions of gunmen, some of whom claim to be Al Q, some of whom are just gangsters. Sanaa, the capital, is divided into armed camps of hooligans and fools (see below), with routine shelling and machine gunfire. There is no coherence in a failed state of 23 million. And yet, the Obama war plan goes ahead with drone attacks on dilettante anarchists like Awlaki, whose mischief included the Times Square creep, the underwear bomber creep, the Fort Hood creep. Yemen resembles the worldwide markets. No order nor theme, just robotic selling and buying, indifferent to history.  Our robots are the message: we don't make sense, we just pound sand and expect worse.  What we can do about it is to change leadership positions and plan for better weather.