Can Florida economy take a double whammy?
BY SCOTT ANDRON (Miami Herald)
Cesar L. Alvarez has practiced corporate law in Miami through 35 years and five national recessions.
He has seen the energy crisis of the 1970s, the rampant inflation of the late '70s and early '80s, and the savings-and-loan failures of the early '90s. But now, with a record housing bust, a financial system meltdown and consumer confidence in the basement, he says none of the past downturns was as bad as today's.
''I think this is the worst that I have seen,'' said Alvarez, now the CEO of the 1,800-lawyer Greenberg Traurig firm. ``If I had to rank it, I would rank it No. 1.''
He's not the only one. South Florida's economy faces a surge in home foreclosures, higher-than-normal inflation, rising unemployment and pullbacks in consumer spending. Add to that the meltdown of the national financial system.
''Florida has been in a relatively mild recession for the past year,'' said University of Florida economist David Denslow. With the national -- in fact, global -- recession, ``we'll have, as it were, a recession on top of a recession.''
Population growth and foreign trade have made past recessions shorter and milder here. But the current downturn comes at a time when population growth has slowed sharply, especially in South Florida. And as our problems spread to foreign markets, we can't rely on them as much to ease our pain.
For the first time since UF researchers began keeping track 40 years ago, the number of electric hookups in the state fell slightly in September compared with the previous year, Denslow told a group of state business leaders Thursday.
Electric hookups are an important indicator that UF's Bureau of Economic and Business Research uses in estimating population growth.
Tony Villamil, an economist and dean of the St. Thomas University business school, agreed with Denslow, adding that Florida's foreign trade partners -- another major shield against past downturns -- are facing their own problems.
''The international sector has been a key driver,'' he said. ``That is starting to slow.''
With all of these economic forces arrayed against us, many observers say South Florida will face the toughest times in recent memory before it's over -- probably in another year or more.
The good news, they say, is that this downturn won't be on the scale of the Great Depression -- when the economy shrank by a third and as many as one in four Americans were out of work.
South Florida has suffered in previous national recessions, although sometimes not as much as other parts of the country.
For instance, the 2001 recession barely registered here. But others were tough, including:
• The 1990-91 recession, which saw the demise of such economic pillars as Eastern Airlines, PanAm and Southeast Bank.
• The 1980-82 downturns, when soaring inflation and mortgage rates of 18 percent put an end to a condo development boom.
• The 1973-75 contraction, when Middle Eastern nations cut the flow of oil to the United States.
Leonard Abess, chairman of City National Bank since 1983, notes that the worst recession is always the one you're in. ''When it's happening, it always seems worse than memory,'' he said.
In some key respects, this downturn doesn't seem as bad as previous cycles.
For instance, Florida's unemployment rate hit 9 percent in the early 1980s; it remains below 7 percent now. And inflation, despite the recent spike in gasoline prices, is nowhere near the double digits of the Carter administration.
But the unemployment rate tends to peak late, after the economy has started to recover. And in recent months, the state has led the nation in job losses.
State figures released Friday showed more than 119,000 jobs lost in the past 12 months. Most were in construction, which has been crushed under the weight of an oversupply of homes.
SPENDING SLOWS
Other signs are worse. Worried consumers are cutting their spending. Car dealers are having trouble getting loans for their customers -- even those with good credit.
Lombardo Perez Sr., president of Metro Ford-Lincoln-Mercury, said this is the worst time for car dealers in the 41 years he has been in the business.
Sales at his stores are down 30 to 35 percent. Fewer customers are visiting, and many who want to buy are being turned down for loans. Even the carmakers' own finance companies, such as GMAC, are pulling back.
''They have cut back leasing down to nothing,'' Perez said. ''People with good credit were able to buy with 5 or 10 percent down payment and get 72 months'' to repay the loan. ``Now you need 20 or 30 percent down.''
Despite big price drops, the housing market has yet to rebound.
In late September, Miami-Dade had a 32-month supply of single-family homes and a 41-month supply of condos listed for sale -- meaning it would take that long to sell all the homes at the current pace. Broward had a 20-month supply of single-family homes and a 29-month supply of condos, South Florida Regional MLS listings data show. In a normal market, homes for sale amount to a six- to 12-month supply.
''I would say the early '80s housing recession was a dreadful moment in South Florida because it brought housing to a halt,'' said Coral Gables real estate consultant David Dabby. ``But it didn't last that long because the government corrected the [high] interest-rate problems.''
That time, however, prices had spiked by only about 80 percent, compared to more than 200 percent in the recent boom. In general, the bigger the spike, the bigger the subsequent drop.
Retailers, meanwhile, are facing the prospect of a not-so-merry Christmas season. The industry forecasts a slight increase in sales; outside observers say sales will more likely be flat or drop slightly. Some predict the worst holiday season in decades.
But Miami retail consultant Herbert Alan Leeds said those predictions are optimistic. He figures the average retailer will see a drop of at least 7 percent in same-store sales for the holiday season. Same-store sales includes only those stores open at least a year. And results in South Florida will likely be worse than the nation, Leeds said.
Most consumers have little money to spend on gifts, and those who do are reluctant to spend it. That reluctance has as much to do with psychology as the actual economic distress, said Leeds, who became a retail consultant in 1975, after a career as a department store executive.
Even the tourism industry, though faring better than most, is bracing for a lackluster 2009.
Typically during and right after a recession, visitors to South Florida from within the United States drop off. From 1990 to 1992, for example, domestic visitors to Miami-Dade County fell.
For the first six months of this year, the number of domestic visitors to Miami-Dade fell 1.2 percent.
But now, as then, foreign visitors helped make up some ground. For the first six months of this year, foreign visitors grew 8.2 percent, for a net gain of 3 percent. Back in the early 1990s? International visitors grew at double-digit rates.
The slowdown in foreign economies threatens to cut into this source of money, too.
Nicki Grossman, president of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau, projects a 4 percent drop in hotel-tax revenue for the budget year that began Oct. 1. That may not seem like much, but it would be the worst drop in the bureau's history, Grossman said. And the projections would have been worse if not for several new hotels.
Aggressive marketing and promotions in the Northeast and Europe should pay dividends in 2009, Grossman said.
People are ''going to want to escape their day-to-day worries,'' she said. ``They're going to want to sit on the beach and forget about the stock market.''
Recent problems in the financial industry -- notably the demise of giants like Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros., Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual and Wachovia -- have prompted comparisons between the current downturn and the Great Depression.
WHAT'S DIFFERENT
The main common theme is a financial crunch. But UF's Denslow and other experts said our current crisis is different in several important ways.
First, the size and scale of our problems, at least so far, are nowhere near that of the 1930s. Second, more protections are in place to prevent panic -- such as federal insurance of bank deposits. And third, the government is moving quickly and aggressively to limit the damage this time.
''We're not going to see the unemployment rate go to 24 or 25 percent,'' Denslow said. ``We're not going to see a one-third decrease in the value of goods and services. It's just not going to happen.''
After the crash of 1929, the government failed to take the kind of actions needed to stem the problems, at least not until President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, said Mira Wilkins, an economic historian at Florida International University.
That's a sharp contrast with Congress' recent decision to spend up to $700 billion bailing out the financial sector.
''When your credit dries up, you should have some firm action . . . to cope with the problem before the problem escalates,'' Wilkins said. ``Despite our anti-government sentiment, despite all the rhetoric about greed on Wall Street, we do have responsible people in government who are going to do something about this and are going to have the economy in mind.''
Orlando-based economist Hank Fishkind agreed.
''The sky fell for sure, but the world didn't come to an end,'' Fishkind said. ``The government stepped in and didn't make the same mistakes it made in the 1930s. It could have been dramatically worse.''
AFTER THE STORM
Some observers predict we will emerge from recession by 2010 but acknowledge that anything could happen.
''No two business cycles are exactly alike,'' said University of Central Florida economist Sean Snaith. ``They're like economic snowflakes. There's no reason to expect any two business cycles will be identical to each other because business is changing all the time.''
However long it takes, attorney Alvarez said, this, too, shall pass.
''Everyone who has ever bet against the U.S. economy has lost,'' he said. ``We have come through every single recession, we have come through it together, and come through it without panicking.''
© 2008 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved.http://www.miamiherald

THAT ONE!

John Q. Barrett (HNN)
St. John’s University School of Law in New York City.

Senator McCain’s finger-pointing, no-look reference to Senator Obama during the October 7th presidential debate as “That One” was more than odd. It was, as most detected, a manifestation of disrespect. What commentators have not noticed is that McCain’s phrase echoed and probably descended from one of the most notorious in the regrettable American history of presidential hate politics.
McCain’s “That One” is a very slight variation on “That Man,” the phrase that haters of President Franklin D. Roosevelt used, particularly during his first two terms (1933-1940), to express their loathing. Born in 1936, McCain no doubt heard some of this talk during his boyhood and he might have absorbed the lingo.
FDR biographer Geoffrey Ward has explained the origins and context of the phrase: President Roosevelt “made bitter enemies of the wealthy Protestants among whom he had lived most of his life. He had raised their taxes, regulated their business practices, threatened their dominance; he was, they said, a hypocrite, untrustworthy, demagogic, a ‘traitor to his class,’ and many of them, hating his name too much even to utter it, simply called him ‘That Man in the White House.’ ”
“That Man” attitudes carried, most regrettably, the whiff of violence. In early 1933, when Roosevelt was president-elect but not yet inaugurated, an assassin shot at him in Florida and barely missed. Six years later, a writer shared this description of mainstream, if private, imaginations of violence: “In the cabañas at Miami Beach the sun-tanned winter visitors said their business would be doing pretty well if it weren’t for THAT MAN. In the country-club locker room the golfers talked about the slow pace of the stock market as they took off their golf shoes; and when, out of a clear sky, one man said, ‘Well, let’s hope somebody shoots him,’ the burst of agreement made it clear that everybody knew who was meant.”
The Roosevelt-haters were in the tradition of other representatives of older, exclusionary orders who feared the future and the American people. As historians Henry Steele Commager and Richard Brandon Morris once explained, “[m]any of Roosevelt’s contemporaries reacted to ‘That Man’—and to the New Deal—the way the Federalists had reacted to [Thomas] Jefferson and the Whigs to [Andrew] Jackson. They saw dictatorship and revolution where the majority of Americans saw leadership and a democratic resurgence.”
Of course FDR was not weakened by this venom. He resisted it and, indeed, he famously used it to his advantage in a speech on the eve of the 1936 election. “We have not come this far without a struggle,” he told a Madison Square Garden crowd, “and I assure you we cannot go further without a struggle. For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent. … We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred.”Just three days after that Roosevelt speech, the American people had their say. The strong majority—including, in 1936 as in 1932 and later in 1940 and 1944, enthusiastic FDR supporter Ronald W. Reagan—rejected “That Man” attitudes. “That One” and similar poisons deserve the same disposal.

The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama
By JIM RUTENBERG (NY Times)
The most persistent falsehood about Senator Barack Obama’s background first hit in 2004 just two weeks after the Democratic convention speech that helped set him on the path to his presidential candidacy: “Obama is a Muslim who has concealed his religion.”
That statement, contained in a press release, spun a complex tale about the ancestry of Mr. Obama, who is Christian.
The press release was picked up by a conservative Web site, FreeRepublic.com, and spread steadily as others elaborated on its claims over the years in e-mail messages, Web sites and books. It continues to drive other false rumors about Mr. Obama’s background.
Just last Friday, a woman told Senator John McCain at a town-hall-style meeting, “I have read about him,” and “he’s an Arab.” Mr. McCain corrected her.
Until this month, the man who is widely credited with starting the cyberwhisper campaign that still dogs Mr. Obama was a secondary character in news reports, with deep explorations of his background largely confined to liberal blogs.
But an appearance in a documentary-style program on the Fox News Channel watched by three million people last week thrust the man, Andy Martin, and his past into the foreground. The program allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government.
An examination of legal documents and election filings, along with interviews with his acquaintances, revealed Mr. Martin, 62, to be a man with a history of scintillating if not always factual claims. He has left a trail of animosity — some of it provoked by anti-Jewish comments — among political leaders, lawyers and judges in three states over more than 30 years.
He is a law school graduate, but his admission to the Illinois bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of “moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.”
Though he is not a lawyer, Mr. Martin went on to become a prodigious filer of lawsuits, and he made unsuccessful attempts to win public office for both parties in three states, as well as for president at least twice, in 1988 and 2000. Based in Chicago, he now identifies himself as a writer who focuses on his anti-Obama Web site and press releases.
Mr. Martin, in a series of interviews, did not dispute his influence in Obama rumors.
“Everybody uses my research as a takeoff point,” Mr. Martin said, adding, however, that some take his writings “and exaggerate them to suit their own fantasies.”
As for his background, he said: “I’m a colorful person. There’s always somebody who has a legitimate cause in their mind to be angry with me.”
When questions were raised last week about Mr. Martin’s appearance and claims on “Hannity’s America” on Fox News, the program’s producer said Mr. Martin was clearly expressing his opinion and not necessarily fact.
It was not Mr. Martin's first turn on national television. The CBS News program "48 Hours" in 1993 devoted an hourlong program, "See You in Court; Civil War, Anthony Martin Clogs Legal System with Frivolous Lawsuits," to what it called his prolific filings. (Mr. Martin has also be known as Anthony Martin-Trigona.) He has filed so many lawsuits that a judge barred him from doing so in any federal court without preliminary approval.
He prepared to run as a Democrat for Congress in Connecticut, where paperwork for one of his campaign committees listed as one purpose “to exterminate Jew power.” He ran as a Republican for the Florida State Senate and the United States Senate in Illinois. When running for president in 1999, he aired a television advertisement in New Hampshire that accused George W. Bush of using cocaine.
In the 1990s, Mr. Martin was jailed in a case in Florida involving a physical altercation.
His newfound prominence, and the persistence of his line of political attack — updated regularly on his Web site and through press releases — amazes those from his past.
“Well, that’s just a bookend for me,” said Tom Slade, a former chairman of the Florida Republican Party, whom Mr. Martin sued for refusing to support him. Mr. Slade said Mr. Martin was driven like “a run-over dog, but he’s fearless.”
Given Mr. Obama’s unusual background, which was the focus of his first book, it was perhaps bound to become fodder for some opposed to his candidacy.
Mr. Obama was raised mostly by his white mother, an atheist, and his grandparents, who were Protestant, in Hawaii. He hardly knew his father, a Kenyan from a Muslim family who variously considered himself atheist or agnostic, Mr. Obama wrote. For a few childhood years, Mr. Obama lived in Indonesia with a stepfather he described as loosely following a liberal Islam.
Theories about Mr. Obama’s background have taken on a life of their own. But independent analysts seeking the origins of the cyberspace attacks wind up at Mr. Martin’s first press release, posted on the Free Republic Web site in August 2004.
Its general outlines have turned up in a host of works that have expounded falsely on Mr. Obama’s heritage or supposed attempts to conceal it, including “Obama Nation,” the widely discredited best seller about Mr. Obama by Jerome R. Corsi. Mr. Corsi opens the book with a quote from Mr. Martin.
“What he’s generating gets picked up in other places,” said Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University who has investigated the e-mail campaign’s circulation and origins, “and it’s an example of how the Internet has given power to sources we would have never taken seriously at another point in time.”
Ms. Allen said Mr. Martin’s original work found amplification in 2006, when a man named Ted Sampley wrote an article painting Mr. Obama as a secret practitioner of Islam. Quoting liberally from Mr. Martin, the article circulated on the Internet, and its contents eventually found their way into various e-mail messages, particularly an added claim that Mr. Obama had attended “Jakarta’s Muslim Wahhabi schools. Wahhabism is the radical teaching that created the Muslim terrorists who are now waging jihad on the rest of the world.”
Mr. Obama for two years attended a Catholic school in Indonesia, where he was taught about the Bible, he wrote in “Dreams From My Father,” and for two years went to an Indonesian public school open to all religions, where he was taught about the Koran.
Mr. Sampley, coincidentally, is a Vietnam veteran and longtime opponent of Mr. McCain and Senator John Kerry, both of whom he accused of ignoring his claims that American prisoners were left behind in Vietnam. He previously portrayed Mr. McCain as a “Manchurian candidate.” Speaking of Mr. Martin’s influence on his Obama writings, Mr. Sampley said, “I keyed off of his work.”
Mr. Martin’s depictions of Mr. Obama as a secret Muslim have found resonance among some Jewish voters who have received e-mail messages containing various versions of his initial theory, often by new authors and with new twists.
In his original press release, Mr. Martin wrote that he was personally “a strong supporter of the Muslim community.” But, he wrote of Mr. Obama, “it may well be that his concealment is meant to endanger Israel.” He added, “His Muslim religion would obviously raise serious questions in many Jewish circles.”
Yet in various court papers, Mr. Martin had impugned Jews.
A motion he filed in a 1983 bankruptcy case called the judge “a crooked, slimy Jew who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.”
In another motion, filed in 1983, Mr. Martin wrote, “I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did.”
In an interview, Mr. Martin denied some statements against Jews attributed to him in court papers, blaming malicious judges for inserting them.
But in his “48 Hours” interview in 1993, he affirmed a different anti-Semitic part of the affidavit that included the line about the Holocaust, saying, “The record speaks for itself.”
When asked Friday about an assertion in his court papers that “Jews, historically and in daily living, act through clans and in wolf pack syndrome,” he said, “That one sort of rings a bell.”
He said he was not anti-Semitic. “I was trying to show that everybody in the bankruptcy court was Jewish and I was not Jewish,” he said, “and I was being victimized by religious bias.”
In discussing the denial of his admission to the Illinois bar, Mr. Martin said the psychiatric exam listing him as having a “moderately severe personality defect” was spitefully written by an evaluator he had clashed with.
Mr. Martin, who says he is from a well-off banking and farming family, is clearly pleased with his newfound attention. But, he said, others have added to his work in “scary” ways.
“They Google ‘Islam’ and ‘Obama’ and my stuff comes up and they take that and kind of use that — like a Christmas tree, and they decorate it,” he said. For instance, he said, he did not necessarily ascribe to a widely circulated e-mail message from the Israeli right-wing activist Ruth Matar, which includes the false assertion, “If Obama were elected, he would be the first Arab-American president.”
He said he had at least come to “accept” Mr. Obama’s word that he had found Jesus Christ. His intent, he said, was only to educate.
Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.

Op-Ed Columnist
The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama
By FRANK RICH NY Times
IF you think way back to the start of this marathon campaign, back when it seemed preposterous that any black man could be a serious presidential contender, then you remember the biggest fear about Barack Obama: a crazy person might take a shot at him.
Some voters told reporters that they didn’t want Obama to run, let alone win, should his very presence unleash the demons who have stalked America from Lincoln to King. After consultation with Congress, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, gave Obama a Secret Service detail earlier than any presidential candidate in our history — in May 2007, some eight months before the first Democratic primaries.
“I’ve got the best protection in the world, so stop worrying,” Obama reassured his supporters. Eventually the country got conditioned to his appearing in large arenas without incident (though I confess that the first loud burst of fireworks at the end of his convention stadium speech gave me a start). In America, nothing does succeed like success. The fear receded.
Until now. At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.
All’s fair in politics. John McCain and Sarah Palin have every right to bring up William Ayers, even if his connection to Obama is minor, even if Ayers’s Weather Underground history dates back to Obama’s childhood, even if establishment Republicans and Democrats alike have collaborated with the present-day Ayers in educational reform. But it’s not just the old Joe McCarthyesque guilt-by-association game, however spurious, that’s going on here. Don’t for an instant believe the many mindlessly “even-handed” journalists who keep saying that the McCain campaign’s use of Ayers is the moral or political equivalent of the Obama campaign’s hammering on Charles Keating.
What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.
By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.
That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.
We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know how self-appointed “patriotic” martyrs always justify taking the law into their own hands.
Obama can hardly be held accountable for Ayers’s behavior 40 years ago, but at least McCain and Palin can try to take some responsibility for the behavior of their own supporters in 2008. What’s troubling here is not only the candidates’ loose inflammatory talk but also their refusal to step in promptly and strongly when someone responds to it with bloodthirsty threats in a crowded arena. Joe Biden had it exactly right when he expressed concern last week that “a leading American politician who might be vice president of the United States would not just stop midsentence and turn and condemn that.” To stay silent is to pour gas on the fires.
It wasn’t always thus with McCain. In February he loudly disassociated himself from a speaker who brayed “Barack Hussein Obama” when introducing him at a rally in Ohio. Now McCain either backpedals with tardy, pro forma expressions of respect for his opponent or lets second-tier campaign underlings release boilerplate disavowals after ugly incidents like the chilling Jim Crow-era flashback last week when a Florida sheriff ranted about “Barack Hussein Obama” at a Palin rally while in full uniform.
From the start, there have always been two separate but equal questions about race in this election. Is there still enough racism in America to prevent a black man from being elected president no matter what? And, will Republicans play the race card? The jury is out on the first question until Nov. 4. But we now have the unambiguous answer to the second: Yes.
McCain, who is no racist, turned to this desperate strategy only as Obama started to pull ahead. The tone was set at the Republican convention, with Rudy Giuliani’s mocking dismissal of Obama as an “only in America” affirmative-action baby. We also learned then that the McCain campaign had recruited as a Palin handler none other than Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina consultant who had worked for George W. Bush in the notorious 2000 G.O.P. primary battle where the McCains and their adopted Bangladeshi daughter were slimed by vicious racist rumors.
No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”
This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.
The operatives who would have Palin quote Pegler have been at it ever since. A key indicator came two weeks after the convention, when the McCain campaign ran its first ad tying Obama to the mortgage giant Fannie Mae. Rather than make its case by using a legitimate link between Fannie and Obama (or other Democratic leaders), the McCain forces chose a former Fannie executive who had no real tie to Obama or his campaign but did have a black face that could dominate the ad’s visuals.
There are no black faces high in the McCain hierarchy to object to these tactics. There hasn’t been a single black Republican governor, senator or House member in six years. This is a campaign where Palin can repeatedly declare that Alaska is “a microcosm of America” without anyone even wondering how that might be so for a state whose tiny black and Hispanic populations are each roughly one-third the national average. There are indeed so few people of color at McCain events that a black senior writer from The Tallahassee Democrat was mistakenly ejected by the Secret Service from a campaign rally in Panama City in August, even though he was standing with other reporters and showed his credentials. His only apparent infraction was to look glaringly out of place.
Could the old racial politics still be determinative? I’ve long been skeptical of the incessant press prognostications (and liberal panic) that this election will be decided by racist white men in the Rust Belt. Now even the dimmest bloviators have figured out that Americans are riveted by the color green, not black — as in money, not energy. Voters are looking for a leader who might help rescue them, not a reckless gambler whose lurching responses to the economic meltdown (a campaign “suspension,” a mortgage-buyout stunt that changes daily) are as unhinged as his wanderings around the debate stage.
To see how fast the tide is moving, just look at North Carolina. On July 4 this year — the day that the godfather of modern G.O.P. racial politics, Jesse Helms, died — The Charlotte Observer reported that strategists of both parties agreed Obama’s chances to win the state fell “between slim and none.” Today, as Charlotte reels from the implosion of Wachovia, the McCain-Obama race is a dead heat in North Carolina and Helms’s Republican successor in the Senate, Elizabeth Dole, is looking like a goner.
But we’re not at Election Day yet, and if voters are to have their final say, both America and Obama have to get there safely. The McCain campaign has crossed the line between tough negative campaigning and inciting vigilantism, and each day the mob howls louder. The onus is on the man who says he puts his country first to call off the dogs, pit bulls and otherwise.

Books (The New Yorker)
Set in Stone
Abraham Lincoln and the politics of memory.
by Thomas Mallon
The Lincoln Memorial, dedicated in 1922, aimed to enshrine the man who saved the Union, not the man who freed the slaves.
At the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington, D.C., on May 30, 1922, remarks by Robert Moton, the principal of the Tuskegee Institute, received special attention from the “colored” section of the audience. The federal commission responsible for the memorial’s construction were loath to have Moton participate at all, let alone emphasize how Lincoln had given “freedom to a race and vindicated the honor of a Nation conceived in liberty.” The commissioners preferred to concentrate on Lincoln as the Savior of the Union, rather than as its Great Emancipator.
William Howard Taft, the Chief Justice and former President, who headed the memorial commission, spoke of sectional reunion and “the restoration of . . . brotherly love” between North and South, as if the two were now morally equivalent entities in a long-ago blue-and-gray pageant. One foray by Taft into the hypothetical went beyond standard historical supposition and amounted to an apology to the nation’s white Southerners: had Lincoln not been killed, Taft declared, “the consequences of the war would not have been as hard for them to bear, the wounds would have been more easily healed, the trying days of reconstruction would have been softened.”
Taft presented the memorial to Warren Harding, the sitting President, and both Republicans took proprietary pleasure in the presence at the ceremony of Lincoln’s only surviving child, the seventy-eight-year-old Robert Todd Lincoln. Robert had spent his early life seeking, and never truly winning, his father’s approval; after his father’s murder, six decades of mass sympathy and deference left him equally unsatisfied. He knew that he would never have been made Secretary of War or Ambassador to Great Britain without the Lincoln name, and his weird accidental presence at the assassinations of Garfield and McKinley, in 1881 and 1901, must have seemed a fateful punishment for refusing his father’s invitation to Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865. That night, Robert stayed home to study Spanish, just as he had chosen to remain upstairs in the White House the day his parents took lowbrow delight in an East Room reception for the newly wed Mr. and Mrs. Tom Thumb.
After the assassination, Robert was left to regulate the grief-driven hysterics of his mother and the swift mythologizing of his father, a man who had thought him no more than “very well, considering.” He pursued both tasks with rigor, committing Mary Lincoln to an insane asylum in 1875 and strictly limiting historians’ access to Abraham Lincoln’s papers, whose shipment back to Illinois he was arranging even before the capture of John Wilkes Booth. Over the course of a half century, Robert fastidiously sought to prove his father’s legitimate birth against contrary suggestions; protested the commercialization of Lincoln’s Springfield home by the relic-collecting Osborn Oldroyd; rejected the log cabin as a symbol of “degradation and uncleanliness”; and helped prevent George Barnard’s statue of a scruffy-looking Lincoln from being displayed in London.
Between 1898 and 1911, again because of the Lincoln name, Robert served as president of the Pullman Company, the biggest employer of African-Americans in the United States. But he was hardly a progressive force, going so far as to refuse a meeting that Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois sought in order to discuss bias in the company’s policies. In the spring of 1922, as he sat on the platform before the segregated audience, Lincoln’s son felt satisfied with both the new memorial’s grandeur and the way its architecture set in stone the secondary nature of Lincoln’s racial revolution. Like the structure’s thirty-six columns (the number of states, including those of the Confederacy, in 1865), the inscription above a statue by Daniel Chester French and the engravings of the Second Inaugural Address and the Gettysburg Address all emphasize the reconnection of North and South. The massive seated Lincoln is even made from Georgia marble. One painted mural above the Gettysburg Address shows the Angel of Truth unshackling a slave, but it is scarcely noticed by most visitors.
The memorial’s designers were at odds with the man they were enshrining. For all his mystical, even bloody-minded, devotion to the Union’s preservation, Lincoln, the reluctant and strategic abolitionist, came to understand emancipation as his chief claim to immortality. A mental breakdown, in 1841, witnessed by his friend Joshua Speed, might have ended in suicide but for Lincoln’s realization, confided to Speed at the time, that if he were to die now he “had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.” When Speed visited the White House in 1863, Lincoln went out of his way to recall this confidence and to declare, “with earnest emphasis,” according to his reliable friend, that the Emancipation Proclamation had fulfilled his long-ago self-willed resurrection from depression.
It is Lincoln the liberator, not the conqueror or conciliator, that has turned the memorial into anything but the stately place envisioned by its planners. The memorial has been the most volatile symbolic locale in Washington, the only one that will do as a backdrop for sea-changing dissent. Marian Anderson’s 1939 concert and Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s 1963 speech would have lost considerable voltage had they been carried out beneath, say, the blandly indifferent obelisk honoring George Washington. Filmmakers and writers from Frank Capra to Philip Roth have sent their characters to the memorial at crucial moments, and it was to the memorial’s steps that Richard Nixon travelled in the middle of the night, thinking that he might find a way of connecting with Vietnam protesters who had already connected with Lincoln. The temple dedicated by Taft and Harding is not a foursquare symbol of unity; it is the seat of every American government in exile.
Robert Lincoln is the unhappy central presence in “Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon” (Knopf; $50), a highly particularized inquiry that travels from the weekend of the President’s assassination past the dedication of his memorial. The book’s authors—Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt, and Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., members of a family involved in Lincoln collecting and scholarship for five generations—proceed here along two chronological tracks, examining the progress of Lincoln biography and the corresponding betrayal of Lincoln’s moral legacy. Among the nearly fifteen thousand books published on Lincoln since his death, this one, which will appear next month, is an oddly magnificent downer, lavish and pictorial, but more wince-inducing than anything else, covering a post-Reconstruction era that prompted Frederick Douglass to pronounce emancipation, in its actual practice, “a stupendous fraud” against Southern blacks and Lincoln himself.
Lincoln’s name was invoked by each side of nearly every national debate in the half century after his death, beginning with the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, the hapless successor who continued to carry Lincoln’s anointment amid dark whisperings, taken seriously by Mary, that he had also been part of the conspiracy to shed Lincoln’s blood. Less than a decade later, as Grant’s corrupt Presidency oozed into its second term, Harper’s Weekly marvelled, “How strong is [Lincoln’s] hold on the American people. Everybody feels that he understands him and has property in him.”
The property’s value seemed ever-increasing and transferrable. The Cold Water men of the temperance movement claimed that Lincoln had taken the pledge; the opposing Wets produced the liquor license that he had applied for as a storekeeper in New Salem, Illinois. President William McKinley publicly argued in October, 1898, that freeing Cuba from Spain was an effort comparable to the emancipation of the slaves, even as the Spanish-American War was chiefly celebrated as one more triumph of reunion, with Southern soldiers donning the blue uniform their fathers had shot at. Theodore Roosevelt, who as a boy had watched Lincoln’s New York funeral procession, pronounced the sixteenth President a “tempered radical” who would have embraced the progressive reforms of the Square Deal. While employing Lincoln’s secretary John Hay as his own Secretary of State, Roosevelt wore a ring with a lock of Lincoln’s hair inside, and insisted he’d had multiple sightings of Lincoln’s ghost in the halls and rooms of the White House.
As the Kunhardts make clear, the more Lincoln’s presumed approval became the political gold standard the worse race relations in America got. In 1908, a year before the centennial of Lincoln’s birth, a black bootmaker he had known named William Donnegan was lynched in the course of an especially grisly race riot in Springfield, Illinois. No blacks were invited to attend the town’s birthday-dinner celebration the following year. During the centennial, Woodrow Wilson, soon to become the nation’s first Southern President since Reconstruction, described the characters of Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee as equally sterling. In his first term, Wilson ordered the Treasury Department to segregate its employee bathrooms and chose the Klan-hymning “Birth of a Nation” to be the first movie ever screened at the White House. His Administration later used Lincoln’s image to sell the Liberty Bonds that financed a war on behalf of global democracy. Out of office and still suffering the effects of the stroke he had had during his second term, Wilson did not attend the dedication of the memorial in 1922, an altogether less democratic ceremony than the one in which the Freedmen’s Memorial—a statue of Lincoln urging a kneeling slave to stand—had been dedicated, near the Capitol, in 1876.
What the authors call the “safeguarding” of Lincoln’s emancipation legacy fell to African-Americans themselves. If any figure rivals Robert for centrality in “Looking for Lincoln,” it is Frederick Douglass, who until his death, in 1895, continued to tell the story of how Lincoln had sought his reaction to the Second Inaugural Address during a White House reception from which policemen had tried to hustle him away. More significant, Douglass offered active rhetorical resistance to the chess-set version of the Civil War that was becoming ever more favored by sentimentalists and reënactors. “There was a right side and a wrong side,” Douglass insisted, a plain truth that could not be smothered by placing flowers “alike and lovingly, on rebel and on loyal graves.”
The authors draw attention to W. E. B. Du Bois as Douglass’s even more aggressive heir, but they don’t seem fully to recognize the way in which Du Bois’s controversial assessment of Lincoln in 1922 is a kind of linchpin for their own enterprise: “I revere him the more because up out of his contradictions and inconsistencies he fought his way to the pinnacle of earth,” Du Bois wrote. “I care more for Lincoln’s great toe than for the whole body of the perfect George Washington, of spotless ancestry, who ‘never told a lie’ and never did anything else interesting.” Du Bois grasped the instinctive appeal of Lincoln’s wounded interior, entry to which seemed visible in the crags of his much photographed face. If Andrew Jackson was the first President with a personality, one that was recognizable to the electorate of his own day, Lincoln can be considered the first with a psychology, a delicate mental makeup that suggested itself to anyone who saw his picture in a newspaper, let alone heard him on a platform. (His sometimes high, even squeaky, voice is the one physical attribute our modern imagination still wants to deny.) Jackson may have been ready to fight any number of duels defending his wife’s honor, but, in the long run, how much more compelling is Lincoln’s patient handling of his wife’s mental fluctuations.
“It is a great relief to get away from Washington and the politicians,” Lincoln told his journalist friend Noah Brooks while reviewing troops before the battle of Chancellorsville, in May of 1863. “But nothing touches the tired spot.” It’s this elusive place that the student of Lincoln is always seeking to reach, attempting to understand and even somehow minister to it. The effort seems, even now, condoned and encouraged by Lincoln, who willingly sat for an array of painters and sculptors and photographers before and during his time in the White House. He is said to have remarked that Mathew Brady’s 1860 picture, taken at the time of the Cooper Union speech, had helped make him President. His steady coöperation with visual artists sprang from the same immortal longings he had once expressed to Joshua Speed.
The authors’ six-decade time line occasionally turns into a necrological grind. Along with the appearance of every major book, they note the passing of each Lincoln intimate and associate, whether it’s William Florville, Lincoln’s Springfield barber, in 1868, or, five years later, Salmon P. Chase, “the sixth of Lincoln’s thirteen cabinet members to join him in death.” The prose in “Looking for Lincoln” often has this kind of pedantic fortissimo, but the sustained raking and display of anecdotes and artifacts—an effort that feels almost archeological—has a peculiar cumulative force. As we witness the suppression of Lincoln’s largest political meaning, we watch, on alternating pages, the gradual reassembly of him as a creature.
The first significant Lincoln biographies were memoirs, amalgamations of research and reminiscence produced by, among others, his law partner, William Herndon, and his secretaries John Hay and John Nicolay. In lectures about his work in progress, Herndon mixed in crowd-pleasing half-truths—an early tragic romance with Ann Rutledge seemed to explain so much of Lincoln’s evident sorrow—but he also gathered up an enormous amount of recollection (not all of it reliable) that would otherwise have perished with Lincoln’s earliest Illinois acquaintances. Judge David Davis, for instance, gave Herndon evidence of an impersonal magnetism that makes Lincoln sound oddly like Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, decidedly remote for all the apparent warmth: “His Stories—jokes &c. which were done to whistle off sadness are no evidences of sociality. . . . His was a peculiar nature . . . no Strong Emotional feelings for any person—Mankind or thing.” Herndon himself recalled that “the whole man—body & mind worked slowly—creekingly, as if it wanted oiling.”
Beset with financial problems, as well as competition and counterattack from Lincoln loyalists and family, Herndon did not get his book out until 1889, and then only with the aid of a ghostwriter who at the last insisted on credit. In the interim, Hay and Nicolay serialized their dry and overlong opus, eventually dedicated to Robert; and Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln’s lawyer-confidant and bodyguard—who had bought up Herndon’s research—surprised the public with a biography so unflattering that it was well reviewed in the South. But in the end victory was Herndon’s: “No biography of Lincoln did more to shape how Americans came to see him,” the Kunhardts accurately argue.
The American craving for Lincoln soon led to the use of his likeness and name to sell life insurance, cholera remedies, and lead (“By Its Purity & Excellent Qualities This Lead Deserves The Name Bestowed Upon It”). Children began playing with Lincoln Logs, invented by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, and, in a telling trivialization, during the 1909 centennial the Waterman Company’s new no-dip Lincoln Fountain Pen guaranteed “the emancipation of millions of slaves to the ink bottle.” If the likeness of any other President had been chosen for the penny, another token of the centennial, it seems probable that that annoying denomination would have been abolished by now.
Authentic Lincoln relics acquired ever-greater imaginative and monetary power. On Election Night in 1876, robbers attempting to make off with Lincoln’s body were thwarted inside his tomb. In 1901, at Robert’s strenuous urging, the remains were reburied under concrete. Visitors to the Springfield home and to the Petersen House, where Lincoln died, across the street from Ford’s Theatre, felt the temptation to nick bits of furniture and wallpaper. The contents of the President’s pockets on the night of the assassination—favorable press clippings, eyeglasses repaired with string—came to repose in a container made for them at the Library of Congress; the blood-soaked pillow on which Lincoln died, displayed at the Petersen House into the nineteen-nineties, has since been taken away for conservation.
The assassination, perpetrated on Good Friday, took on religious dimensions within forty-eight hours, when Easter Sunday sermons made explicit parallels to the Crucifixion. Even before that, the authors tell us, Lincoln may have become “the first non-Jew over whom Kaddish prayers were chanted in the synagogue.” Before long, the survivors and biographers were warring over the degree to which Lincoln himself had, or had not, been a believer. Mary Lincoln came to insist that he was; Herndon felt certain of the opposite, and the son of Lincoln’s friend Samuel Hill went so far as to claim that his father had burned a short, politically inexpedient book in which the young Lincoln had questioned the authority of the Bible and the existence of a hereafter. Even so, Frederick Douglass saw both saintliness and prophecy in Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, Lincoln’s florid opposite, was given to ask himself—in something like the current, braceleted evangelical way—“what Lincoln would have done.”
Hay, who worked for both Presidents, wrote that Lincoln had moved “in a flash of blinding light . . . full panoplied into the religion of the people.” The process was slower than that, a gradual and disorderly canonization, furthered by the biographers’ presentation of a hundred little mercies and miracles performed by Lincoln. All of them eventually made his earthly existence seem, even to Southerners, less a life than an incarnation. As the memorial itself took on an unexpected vitality, Lincoln became fully and mystically available to the citizenry, a figure beyond ownership by any faction.
In the nineteen-twenties, despite the crush of Republicans on the speakers’ platform at the memorial, Lincoln was slipping from the grasp of the party he had helped to establish. New Dealers, thirties radicals (the Abraham Lincoln Brigade), and marchers in the postwar civil-rights movement all soon had their time with him, but while specific moments of counterintuitive convenience have permitted, say, Reagan to appropriate Franklin Roosevelt—or even Bill Clinton to praise Reagan—Lincoln now presides over the Republic inside such a diffuse and deified glow that political invocations of him usually feel meaningless. Even as Americans annex the memorial to big causes, they seem mostly to need Lincoln—and respond to him—in a psychological and spiritual way. If we are indeed a Christian nation, he is the Christ, and politicians risk looking silly when they mention him in connection with their little quadrennial concerns.
In 1909, the Reverend L. H. Magee, the pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Springfield, Illinois, voiced his disgust at the exclusion of blacks from the town’s centennial dinner, but he imagined that by the time of the bicentennial, in 2009, racial prejudice would be “relegated to the dark days of ‘Salem witchcraft.’ ” Next year’s Lincoln commemorations in Washington will include the reopening of Ford’s Theatre, restored for performances for the second time since 1893, when its interior collapsed, killing twenty-two people. Congress will convene in a joint session on February 12th, and on May 30th the still new President will rededicate the Lincoln Memorial. The look and the emphasis of the occasion will have changed—measurably, for certain; astoundingly, perhaps—in the fourscore and seven years since 1922. ♦

U.S. history books have Indians all wrong, says author
By Peter B. LordJournal Environment Writer
SOUTH KINGSTOWN — Much of what most Americans were taught about American Indian life before Europeans arrived is simply not true. Rather than comprising small numbers of nomadic wanderers, many tribes developed cities and agricultural systems so vast some now believe they actually affected the earth’s climate.
That was the message delivered by journalist Charles C. Mann in a lecture that was part of the University of Rhode Island’s 2008 Honors Colloquium “Global Environmental Change.”
Mann completed a book two years ago, 1491 — New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, that has won major awards and been praised for its revisions of commonly accepted history.
Mann displayed a portrait of American Indians that he said was used in a history book he was taught with as a child. Almost every part of the portrait he now knows is wrong, he said.
The Indians didn’t have horses until Europeans arrived. The tumbleweeds in the picture were an alien species introduced from Russia. Indians didn’t wear the headdresses depicted in the picture.
Most people were taught, as was he, that Indians migrated across the Bering Straits 12,000 years ago and lived in small groups, having little effect on the environment.
Mann said researchers now believe Indians migrated to the Americas 20,000 to 35,000 years ago and grew to a population estimated at 40 million to 60 million people. And they lived in cities 800 years ago as big as those in Europe at the time.
One city in Mexico had 215,000 inhabitants who lived on an island in the middle of a man-made lake. Another, near modern-day St. Louis, attracted thousands of inhabitants before it was destroyed by floods. A city in Peru was surrounded by a wall greater than the one built around Rome.
The Inca empire, he said, was the largest in the world at its height. The Incas created a huge network of roads.
In the Amazon, Indians altered thousands of square miles of wetlands, Mann said, so they could live on mounds of dry ground and travel on raised causeways. They also created vast designs of raised earth whose purposes scientists still don’t understand.
In other parts of the Amazon, he said, researchers have found Indians made the dirt more fertile by mixing it with charcoal and millions of smashed pieces of pottery. Some estimate that 12 percent of the Amazon was transformed for agriculture.
Researchers also have found vast arrays of raised mounds and ditches on the west coast of Florida that they believe were built to keep Indian communities dry and safe during high tides and storms.
Other researchers have estimated that the 5,000 members of the Pocumtuck tribe in Massachusetts annually burned about 110 square miles of forest to provide land for corn and hunting.
Most of those societies crashed between 1500 and 1650, when Mann said some 95 percent of the Indians were killed by the zoonotic diseases introduced by Europeans. Zoonotic diseases are those such as influenza, malaria, measles and the plague that are transferred from animals to people. Most Europeans were immune because they lived with their domestic animals. Indians had no domestic animals.
Very recent scientific papers have questioned whether the Little Ice Age from 1550 to 1700 caused the collapse of Indian societies, leading to reforestation of the Americas, which in turn removed from the atmosphere lots of carbon dioxide, which causes global warming, Mann said.
In a related matter, some have wondered whether the Medieval Warm Period from 800 to 1300 may have resulted from the Indians doing so much burning of forests as their populations peaked.
In response to a question from the audience, Mann said Americans have done a “lousy job” of preserving historic Indian sites. Some built a highway through the ancient city outside of St. Louis.
Next Tuesday at 7:30 p.m., URI will host a talk by Stanford University Prof. Stephen R. Palumbi at Edwards Auditorium on the “Impact of Global Environmental Change on Evolution.”
plord@projo.com

From The Miami Herald
Obama holds advertising advantage over McCain
By JIM KUHNHENN
Barack Obama spent $3.3 million in TV advertising on Monday. At that rate the Democrat will spend more than $90 million on ads through Election Day - more than all the money Republican rival John McCain has to spend on his entire fall campaign.
McCain's ad spending Monday totaled about $900,000 and the Republican National Committee weighed in with about $700,000 worth.
All whopping numbers, but the disparity between Obama and the Republicans is so wide that it has allowed Obama to spend in more states than McCain, to appear more frequently in key markets and to diversify his message by both attacking McCain and promoting his own personal story.
With national and state polls showing him building a broader lead over McCain, Obama has switched to a more positive pitch. Last week, only 34 percent of his ads attacked McCain directly while virtually all of McCain's ads attacked Obama, according to a study by the Wisconsin Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
One of Obama's most recent ads came as Sarah Palin, McCain's running mate, made an issue of Obama's connections to 1960s radical Bill Ayers and argued that Obama "is not a man who sees America like you and I see America."
The ad bespeaks Americana. In it, Obama recalls being a child, sitting on his grandfather's shoulders and waving an American flag as they watched astronauts return from a splashdown. "And my grandfather would say, 'Boy, Americans, we can do anything when we put our minds to it.'"
The ad offers a direct response to Palin. But it also illustrates Obama's continuing need as an African-American to reassure voters about his candidacy.
Boosted by an economy in crisis and a saturation of advertising, Obama has built up his margins over McCain in Democratic-leaning battlegrounds such as Pennsylvania and Michigan. He has tilted Republican-leaning states such as Colorado and New Mexico toward his side. And he has created contests in such reliably Republican states as Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina.
At the same time, outside groups have weighed in on both sides. VoteVets.org, a group critical of Bush war policies, on Wednesday began spending $350,000 on ads in Virginia criticizing McCain for opposing full college scholarships for those who serve three years in the military.
Health Care for America Now, a coalition that includes unions and patient advocates, is airing an ad in Ohio and on national cable criticizing McCain's health care plan, echoing a similar message in an Obama ad.
By now, McCain's allies had hoped the Arizona senator would have established his dominance in states won by President Bush in 2000 and 2004 and would have focused on winning two of the three key Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan.
But McCain stopped advertising in Michigan, Obama leads in Pennsylvania and he has the edge in Ohio.
"Money doesn't always mean victory, but it means that you have more options to cover more of the battlefield," Republican strategist Terry Holt said. "We're going to have to win with less."
Less is right. Obama is outspending McCain in practically every one of the 14 states the two camps are contesting. One exception is Iowa, where McCain spent more than Obama even though Obama has been sitting on a comfortable lead in the polls.
The biggest discrepancy exists in North Carolina, where Obama spent eight times more than McCain on ads, according to the Wisconsin Advertising Project and TNS Media Intelligence/CMAG, which tracks political ads.
Obama's spending advantage in North Carolina might reflect the McCain campaign's reluctance to devote resources to a state that might ultimately follow precedent and vote Republican anyway. But polls in the state show Obama closing the gap.
Meanwhile, Obama's ability to spend is restrained only by his ability to raise money.
He is the first major party candidate to decline public financing in the general election, leaving him free to spend as much as he can raise. McCain, on the other hand, is limited to spending only the $84 million in public funds he accepted to cover all his costs in September and October.
The RNC is helping with its own resources. It raised a record $66 million in September. Obama has not disclosed his September finances; he doesn't have to until Oct. 20, when financial reports are due to the Federal Election Commission.
Even with their combined resources, McCain and the RNC trailed Obama in ad spending last week by more than $6 million.

You didn't ask about the debate, but...
By Roger Ebert
I have some observations about what we observed Thursday night. They are not political. They involve such matters as body language, facial expression and vocal tone. These are legitimate subjects for a film critic. As Patrick Goldstein wrote recently in the Los Angeles Times: "In some ways film critics are probably better equipped to assess the political theater of today's presidential campaigns, since our campaigns are -- as has surely been obvious for some time -- far more about theater and image creation than politics." I would like to discuss the vice presidential debate as theater.
I sensed that Sarah Palin was nervous. Well, she had every right to be, and as I thought about the debate during the day on Thursday, I felt some empathy for her: In university terms, she was being asked to defend her doctoral thesis without having written it. If that had been me facing Joe Biden with the same preparation, I don't know if I could even have walked onto the stage.
So she was understandably nervous, and you could tell that by her rapid speech, faster than what we've heard from her before . Listening to her voice, you could also sense when she felt she'd survived the deep waters of improvisation and was climbing onto the shore of talking points. When she was on familiar ground, she perked up, winked at the audience two or three times, and settled with relief into the folksiness that reminds me strangely of the characters in "Fargo."
Palin is best in that persona. You want to smile with her and wink back. But who did she resemble more? Marge Gunderson, whose peppy pleasantries masked a remorseless policewoman's logic? Or Jerry Lundegaard, who knew he didn't have the car on his lot, but smiled when he said, "M'am, I been cooperatin' with ya here." Palin was persuasive. But I felt a brightness that was not always convincing.
Yes, she wins high marks for emerging from the debate still standing and still smiling. Polls show that she performed better than a great majority of viewers thought she would. My concern here is not with the substance of which either candidate said; that would be political. My concern is with the performances. Watching the debate, I was reminded of an observation by Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great 18th century English critic, about an unrelated subject: "It is not done well, but one is surprised to find it done at all."
One thing a critic of a live performance is sensitive to is any unanticipated moment. There was a famous moment at the National Theater in London when an actor pulled out an automatic pencil to make some notes. It contained no lead. He should have pretended it did. Instead, he said, "There is no lead in my pencil." Then, fatally, he paused to listen to what he had said, and the audience roared with laughter when they were certainly not intended to.
A very different sort of unanticipated moment took place during the debate. Biden said, "I know what it's like to be a single parent raising two children." He did not know if his sons would survive the auto accident that took his wife and daughter. For a moment, he lost his composure. Looking at the moment again, I believe, as I did at the time, that it was genuine emotion, and not stagecraft.
It could not have been anticipated by Palin. The next camera angle was above and behind her. She paused. The silence seemed to anticipate words of sympathy and identification from her. But Biden had ended in a sentence using the word "change," and her response, reflecting no emotion at all, cued off that word and became a talking point about McCain. This felt to me, at worst, insensitive and callous. At best, that she had not fully heard Biden. In either event, her response troubled me. If a man had responded in that way to such a statement from a women, he would be called a heartless brute. [See link below]
Sometimes during a live performance you can hear an actor "going up." That's actor-speak for forgetting the lines. Laurence Olivier went up on an Oscarcast, after he was awarded an honorary Oscar. Whatever he said (the transcript shows it made no sense), the speech made an enormous impression. In an audience reaction shot, you could lip-read Jon Voight: "Wow." The next morning I went to interview Michael Caine. "Larry called me last night," he said. "He asked what I thought of his speech. I said it was wonderful, but I didn't have the slightest idea what he had said. He said I was exactly right: 'It's like during Shakespeare, when you go up and start blathering about being off to Salisbury on the morn.'"
I sensed that happening during Palin's response to the question about same-sex marriage and civil contracts. She was clear that she opposed same-sex marriage. So was Biden. I have no idea what she said about civil contracts. Neither did Gwen Ifil, apparently, because she concluded that Biden and Palin were in agreement. I knew what McCain (and supposedly Palin) really thought about the subject. I sensed that Palin had gone off to Salisbury.

Weather disasters explained
In 1816 a freak summer led to the creation of Frankenstein, the invention of the bicycle and Turner's finest paintings. In the bleak winter of 1947, Britain nearly starved. The Times's weatherman explains why

In April 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia exploded so violently that a third of it vanished in rocks and dust. It was possibly the biggest eruption in recorded history, killing around 10,000 people outright and many more from starvation and disease.
Ash and sulphuric acid were blasted 43km (27 miles) into the stratosphere, then spread around the globe, hanging as a veil over the sky and blocking out sunlight for years. As a result, global temperatures dropped so drastically that, in the northern hemisphere, the year after was known as “the year without a summer”.
In Britain the summer of 1816 was wet, cold and wretched. The foul weather rotted crops and led to shortages of food.
Farmworkers were left unemployed, grain prices soared and mobs went on the rampage for food - in one riot, some 2,000 people in Dundee ransacked more than 100 shops and a grain store. In Ireland, rain fell on 142 out of 153 days of summer, potato crops rotted and an estimated 60,000 people died of famine or typhoid. Across Europe there was desolation, at a time when the continent was emerging from the Napoleonic Wars.
In the grim climate of 1816, crop failures in France led to riots that shook the new constitutional monarchy of Louis XVIII and Talleyrand. Starving Germans baked straw and sawdust into loaves of “bread”, and in Switzerland people ate moss in desperation. At least 200,000 people died from famine in Europe, and the weather was also blamed for a typhus epidemic from 1816 to 1819 that killed millions more. Thousands of people emigrated to the US, only to find conditions there just as bad - the northeast suffered snow in June and frosts in July that ruined harvests and, in turn, drove a mass migration of farmers westwards across the prairies.
In India, the monsoon failed and the resulting famine triggered the world's first cholera pandemic. Cold weather killed trees, rice crops and water buffalo herds in northern China and disrupted the monsoon season there as well.
The dismal weather did have some more fortunate consequences. In Switzerland, Lord Byron rented a villa near Lake Geneva. Among his guests were 18-year-old Mary Shelley and her husband Percy. Incessant rain kept the members of the house party trapped indoors for days, so Byron declared: “We will each write a ghost story.” The result was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, published in 1818.
That same summer party inspired another masterpiece, by Dr John Polidori, Byron's personal physician, who wrote The Vampyre, which eventually inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula. Byron became so depressed in the gloomy weather that he wrote Darkness, a poem about the extinction of the sun:
“I had a dream, which was not all a dream./ The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars/Did wander darkling in the eternal space,/ Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth/ Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;/ Morn came and went - and came, and brought no day...”
The volcanic ash of Tambora also created brilliant sunsets, twilights glowing orange or red near the horizon, purple to pink above as sunlight scattered off the dust floating in the stratosphere. Those vivid skies became a trademark of the painter William Turner, who also lived through several other major eruptions, including that of the Babuyan Claro volcano in the Philippines in 1831, that resulted in spectacular sunsets and twilights as well as green and blue-coloured suns.
In Germany the soaring price of oats spurred Karl Drais to invent a replacement for the horse - the draisine, a forerunner of the bicycle. He first demonstrated it in June 1817 and the machines proved popular to begin with, although most cities ended up banning them as a menace to pedestrians.
WINTER 1947
After the Second World War Britain was bombed out, bankrupt, exhausted and desperately short of fuel. The winter of 1947 sank the country to a level of deprivation unknown even during the war. A catalogue of weather calamities precipitated a national crisis and changed Britain and the rest of Europe for decades afterwards.
The winter began deceptively, with just a brief cold snap before Christmas 1946. Snow lay thick on the ground when, in mid-January, temperatures soared so high that it felt as if spring had arrived early. The snow thawed so rapidly that it set off floods - just as hurricane-force winds brought down roofs, trees and even houses and a railway bridge in Birmingham.
But real winter arrived soon afterwards as the country was gripped in an Arctic freeze that lasted for two months, with snow whipped into monstrous drifts that buried roads and railways. The temperature fell to -21C at Woburn, Buckinghamshire.
On February 20 the Dover to Ostend ferry service was suspended because of pack-ice off the Belgian coast. It became the coldest February ever recorded - and there was virtually no sunshine for almost the whole month.
The freeze paralysed coalmines, with coal stocks often stuck at the collieries by railways and roads buried in snow. Even carrying coal by sea was hazardous, with storms, fog and iced-over harbours.
A week after the freeze began, the Minister of Fuel and Power, Emmanuel Shinwell, ordered electricity supplies to be cut to industry, and domestic electricity supplies to be turned off for five hours each day, to conserve coal stocks. Whitehall and Buckingham Palace were reduced to working by candlelight. Television was closed down, radio output reduced, newspapers cut in size and magazines ordered to stop publishing. The emergency package hardly made a difference to power supplies but was a crushing blow to public morale.
Food supplies shrank alarmingly and rations were cut even lower than they had been during the war. Farms were frozen or snowed under, and vegetables were in such short supply that pneumatic drills were used to dig up parsnips from frozen fields. For the first time, potatoes were rationed after some 70,000 tons of them were destroyed by the cold.
The Government tried a deeply unpopular campaign to encourage everyone to eat a cheap South African fish called snoek, millions of tins of which had been imported - but it tasted disgusting and was used eventually as cat food.
Those delivering food supplies were battling to get through blizzards and snowdrifts, and The Attlee Government was seriously worried that the country could slide into famine.
March turned out even worse than February. March 5 brought the worst blizzard of the 20th century. Supplies of food shrank so low that in some places the police asked for authority to break open stranded lorries carrying food cargoes. On March 6 The Times reported: “The blizzard has virtually cut England in two. It is almost impossible to get from South to North.”
Eventually, on March 10, a sustained thaw set in - and triggered another spectacular disaster. After weeks of deep frost, the ground was so hard that the melting snow ran off into raging torrents of floodwater and, to make things worse, a huge storm dropped heavy rain. Indeed, it was the wettest March on record in England and Wales. The winds whipped up floodwater into waves that breached dykes in the Fens, flooding 100 square miles of rich farmland, and houses collapsed. Canada sent food parcels to stricken villages in Suffolk, and the prime minister of Ontario even offered to help to dish them out.
It is difficult to imagine a worse run of weather, although the Government was blamed for the food and fuel crises. Elected in the summer of 1945 with a landslide majority, the Labour administration had embarked on a radical programme of nationalisation, including the health service, coalmining, electricity supply and railways. But it was caught unprepared when people began to buy electric fires and immersion heaters, and power stations could not meet the rising demand for energy.
Yet despite the collapsing economy and threat of starvation, the Government carried on behaving as if it were in control of a world superpower. Military expenditure was 15 per cent of GDP - far higher than before the war - and included the development of Britain's own nuclear bomb, as well as forces stationed in Europe and across the Empire. With a hugely ambitious programme of free healthcare and reconstruction, it was simply unsustainable. The winter of 1947 led to savage cuts in public spending at home and contributed to the humiliating devaluation of sterling from $4 to $2.80 the next year.
Less than two years after winning the war, the nation was left freezing cold, plunged into darkness and on the brink of starvation - and for many people it showed that national planning and socialism did not work. Labour was turned out of office in a landslide defeat at the next general election.
Had the winter of 1947 been kinder, and had power cuts been avoided, perhaps Labour and its programme of nationalisation would have been seen as a great success. Perhaps it would have been seen as the “natural party of government”, as its political equivalents were for the following decades in Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
The legacy of that winter had other aspects, too. After years of war and deprivation, the British public had had enough. Many simply voted with their feet and emigrated rather than suffer any more hardships.
Some historians believe that the winter of 1947 was also a milestone in the decline of Britain as a world superpower. The nation could hardly feed its own population, let alone the starving millions for which it was responsible in Germany, where the winter was even more savage. The populations of the bombed-out cities there were reduced to an almost Stone-Age existence of scavenging for food and fuel to survive.
America looked to Britain as a bulwark against the threat of communism in Europe. Instead it saw a nation on its knees. It was then that the US administration realised that it would have to save Europe single-handedly. As a result, the US proposed a more active role in the defence of Western Europe and used the Marshall Plan to boost the recovery of the European economies with billions of dollars of aid.
The Marshall Plan kick-started Germany's great postwar industrial revival - and brought Western Europe together in an economic co-operation that eventually became the Common Market.
© Paul Simons 2008