If Joe Biden was both truthful and informed when he insisted last night, "I'm not the guy," where does that leave us? Tim Kaine has also said he doesn't expect to be picked. Evan Bayh has supposedly been sidelined for reasons of egregious moderation. The more I think about, the more I come to the conclusion that it would be silly to count out Kathleen Sebelius.

Sebelius, of course, would be the bold, unconventional choice -- very Obama. But by choosing a female running mate, Obama would, unfortunately, thrust the Hillary die-hards and their ever-more marginal discontentment back into the spotlight. That said, anyone who believes that only Hillary Clinton deserves to be the first female president or vice president doesn't deserve the designation "feminist." So I'd relish watching the reactions to a Sebelius nod, not only because such a choice would double down on Obama's most effective message -- "change" -- but because it would reveal exactly which Clinton boosters are ready to widen the lens and enthusiastically support women's leadership as such.

--Dana Goldstein

• Running mate announcement watch: Barack Obama will make an appearance with his VP pick in Springfield, IL, on Saturday, the same location where he announced his candidacy in February 2007. It is unknown at this time whether the identity of the veep will be disclosed in advance. Personally, I would like to see the veep jump out from behind a curtain, preferably one colored a lush burgundy (or lavender) and made of crushed velvet, to the sounds of trumpeting horns - that's the only way I see for the announcement to live up to the hype of the veepstakes. In other news, John McCain also made the revelation that his veep choice will be announced on August 29 in Dayton, OH -- the day after the gavel closes the Democratic National Convention.
• National Review reports that John McCain has been contacting state GOP officials to sound out the feasibility of a pro-choice VP pick, most likely Joe Lieberman. Another possibility being floated by the Cornerites is Rudy Giuliani, which could produce a truly awesome vice-presidential debate between Joe Biden and America's Mayor.
• Al Gore is scheduled to speak on the final night of the Democratic National Convention -- and on the same stage at Invesco Field where Barack Obama will give his acceptance speech. The campaign is mum on the time slot.
• A New York Times/CBS News poll of DNC delegates asked who their preferred running mate is. Hillary Clinton topped the list with 28 percent (although fully one third offered no opinion). The next highest pick was Joe Biden, at 6 percent.
• Greg Sargent reports that John McCain is outspending Barack Obama by hundreds of thousands of dollars in battleground state television advertising. But as Sean at FiveThirtyEight points out, and I concur, these figures don't begin to reckon with the vast sums Obama has sunk into his field operations compared to McCain's very modest -- in some cases nonexistent -- efforts.
• The Washington Times has a write-up on Obama's "southern strategy" but I recommend the Salon.com discussion between Bob Moser and Prospect alum Tom Schaller for more rigorous analysis on the relevance of Dixie to Democrats this election cycle.
• New national polls: Quinnipiac University has Obama ahead of McCain by five points among likely voters, 47-42 and a L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll has Obama up by two, 45-43.
• Chris Cillizza does some solid reporting on Democratic challenger Andrew Rice's chances of taking away Republican James Inhofe's Senate seat in Oklahoma. The verdict: the race is on the "national radar," but unlikely to flip now or in the near future.
• And Finally, McCain campaign blogger Michael Goldfarb apologizes for insulting Dungeons & Dragons fans. Haven't gotten near a non-computer-based RPG in over a decade so maybe I'm out of touch, but I had no idea this constituency was such a valued part of the GOP base.

--Mori Dinauer

MSNBC just announced that, starting on September 8, Rachel Maddow will have her own nightly show on MSNBC at 9 p.m., right after Keith Olbermann's show at 8. She'll replace Dan Abrams, who will remain on the network. I'm working a piece about Maddow for the next issue of the Prospect; she's a fascinating figure, a great object lesson for progressives in the media, and also just a deeply sensible person.

I'm not surprised by this development, though it came somewhat sooner than I expected (As Olbermann points out in a Daily Kos diary entry about the announcement, she's only been a paid guest on MSNBC for five months). It's also worth noting that, while Olbermann's support has been part of her success at MSNBC she's also really well liked by executives there. Fans of her Air America radio show shouldn't worry, her show's executive producer Vanessa Silverton-Peel just confirmed to me over email that it will continue. As Maddow told me about doing both, "If Glenn Beck can do it" she said "why can't I?"

--Sam Boyd

The Round-Up returns with background info on Georgia and a deep love for the reality-based community.

• Past is prologue. Georgia and its neighbor Azerbaijan have a history of supplying the world with oil, the Center for Strategic and International Studies' David C. Chow notes. These same oil reserves are both Russia's target and the key to Georgia and Azerbaijan obtaining and retaining full independence, and Chow analyzes the various options policymakers have to encourage a diversity of supply routes -- including potential cooperation with China and Iran. - DS
• Shadow army. This report got some play last week, but the CBO's research into contractors in Iraq is worth a second look. For one, there are more contractors -- 190,000, 20 percent U.S. citizens -- than soldiers, a ratio 2.5 times higher than in any other conflict in U.S. history (though the Balkans were close). Interestingly, the cost of private security contractors is about the same as the cost of a similar military unit ... until the contract is up, since military units continue to contribute to the force structure -- i.e. train, perform non-combat duties, etc. -- after their deployment. -- TF
• Just the facts. Public policy needs to be based more on evidence, according to a group of authors at the Urban Institute. In the United Kingdom and other countries, evidence-based policy is growing in popularity, but in the U.S. ideological considerations cloud the process and make government ineffective. What to do? Adopt a laser focus on three questions: "What exactly is the problem? What are the possible ways to address the problem? And what are the probable impacts of each?" - DS
• Personal Worst. Productivity's up, GDP's up, but are your wages? Didn't think so. The Economic Policy Institute's 11th State of Working America (2008/2009) elucidates the thankless hard work of our middle class. They've grown the U.S. economy over the last seven years, but are left with nothing to show for it in their wallets. A snippet of the report has been posted; check back for more by Labor Day and for the complete report by January 2009. - CP

--TAP STAFF

PREVIOUS ROUND-UPS:
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No Child Left Behind contains a "transfer provision" that allows parents to move their children out of failing schools and into better ones within their district. Yet, nationwide, less than 2 percent of eligible students have taken advantage of the transfer policy. Why?

The most obvious answer is that low-performing districts tend to have multiple low-performing schools, so transferring is far from a cure-all. In those cases, inter-district transfers would be a far more attractive option. But there are also bureaucratic hurdles. For example, The Washington Post explained yesterday that in D.C., notices of the right to transfer schools are mailed out only three weeks before the academic year begins. By that time, spots in the best public charters have long since been doled out to more aggressive families. What's more, students in over 80 failing schools are given less than a dozen (marginally) more successful schools to choose from, some of which do not offer services for special needs children. The result? Frustration.

In other edu news, Ezra has two must-reads today.

--Dana Goldstein

As Scott writes, the V.P. buzz is certainly swirling around Joe Biden today -- so I've been thinking back to the days I spent on the trail with Biden the week before the Iowa caucus. Biden was a candidate obsessed with "experience" as a credential for the presidency, and his most ardent supporters were highly skeptical and dismissive of Obama, whom they viewed as green. Unsurprisingly, Biden talked primarily about foreign policy on the trail, from his Iraq withdrawal plan to an old confrontation with Slobodan Milosevic, whom Biden called  "a damned war criminal" to his face.

Biden also touted his leadership on the Violence Against Women Act, but couldn't resist insulting feminist groups in the process -- accusing them of ignoring the issue. "They were more concerned about the choice and gender issues," he would say. "While others talked, I got it done." In fact, the legislation was partly drafted by the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, now known as Legal Momentum.

In short, there's not much evidence from Biden's abbreviated 2008 run that he would strengthen Obama's hand on the economy, this year's defining issue. But the most charming thing about candidate Biden was that he traveled with an entourage of 20 bubbly Irish Catholic relatives, including his 90-year-old mother, Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden, and his baby grandson Hunter.

Biden's sister was his national campaign chair. The Bidens are an accessible (cough, white) American family with a heart-wrenching tale of tragedy -- Biden's first wife and infant daughter were killed in a car crash shortly after he was elected to the Senate in 1972. As a single dad, Biden commuted by train to D.C. and made sure to be back in Delaware each night with his two surviving sons. Biden remarried in 1977. He and wife Jill Tracy Jacobs, a professor, have one daughter. As one Biden supporter told me in Iowa, "They're going to be the next Kennedy family!"

Lastly, Biden is genuinely funny. That never hurts, and does a lot to make up for his history of gaffes.

--Dana Goldstein

Robert Kuttner on how Obama can fight Republican efforts to conjure an "entitlement crisis":

If Barack Obama is elected president, he will inherit not just the most serious financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression. He will face an obstructionist orthodoxy about government spending that will make recovery even more difficult to achieve. The nature of our economic, social, and fiscal problems and the boundaries of the politically possible have been defined by conservatives who have often skillfully co-opted moderate liberals. Nowhere is this more the case than in the received wisdom that there is an "entitlement crisis" and that the federal budget needs to be balanced.

And Paul Waldman reflects on the Olympics:

In other words, even for those who profess their love of America in the loudest voices, who can't wait for the next opportunity to chant "USA! USA!", patriotism may be a little more complex than it seems.

The Olympics certainly have made me well with pride in America. But it wasn't the gold medals that did it; it was something else entirely. It started with the opening ceremonies. As each country's athletes walked around the track, one couldn't help but marvel at the diversity of the human race and our variety of cultures and languages. Nonetheless, there was something different about the American team: they didn't all look alike.

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—The Editors

Michael Goldfarb, using the McCain campaign’s tactic of responding to any criticism of their candidate by citing his experience as POW, answers questions about the remarkable similarity between McCain’s “cross in the dirt” story and an anecdote often told by Alexander Solzhenitsyn by once again invoking the fearsome specter of Dungeons and Dragons:

It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman’s memory of war from the comfort of mom’s basement, but most Americans have the humility and gratitude to respect and learn from the memories of men who suffered on behalf of others.

This is similar to something Goldfarb has said before. Last time, as Ben Smith points out, Goldfarb apologized, displaying a tongue in cheek familiarity with the rules of the game.

If my comments caused any harm or hurt to the hard working Americans who play Dungeons & Dragons, I apologize. This campaign is committed to increasing the strength, constitution, dexterity, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma scores of every American.

That's the kind of deep, personal animosity that you associate with experience, which clearly Goldfarb has. It’s not hard to imagine that some basement somewhere holds the abandoned d20s, dusty rulebooks, and broken heart of a young Michael Goldfarb who never got to be Dungeon Master because he wouldn’t stop yelling. In fact, it’s hard not to wonder if, when Michael Goldfarb is berating the D&D players of the world, he’s really just berating Michael Goldfarb. For all his criticisms of the “Dailykos” crowd, if “Dungeons and Dragons” becomes a part of our political lexicon, we’ll know who to thank. 

—A. Serwer

Founding Editor Bob Kuttner is joining us on TAPPED with commentary about his new book, Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency, and on economic issues in the campaign.

Well, Obama’s Challenge (the book) is stimulating a lot of press notice, but not exactly the sort I had in mind. It set off a huge controversy about what’s fair play in the publishing industry. What’s fair? You decide.

Seeing the torrent of hostile Obama books, most notably the shameless and dishonest hatchet job by Jerome Corsi, my publisher decided to get Obama’s Challenge out as fast as possible, in time for the Democratic National Convention. She is Margo Baldwin, president of the highly innovative independent publishing house, Chelsea Green Publishers. CGP began 24 years ago as a publisher specializing in environmental titles, and lately has had two original paperback general bestsellers, by George Lakoff and by Naomi Wolf. We’re hoping Obama’s Challenge will be a third.

Margo negotiated a highly creative deal with Amazon, to offer readers the benefits of its new print-on-demand service. You order it, they print, and you get it two days from the time of your order. An Amazon discount coupon will also be in the packets of DNC delegates, alternates, and media. In the meantime, Chelsea Green is rushing out its regular print edition, which will be in bookstores after Labor Day. Or maybe it won’t.

When the Amazon agreement was announced, Amazon’s retail competitors pushed back big time. Amazon is of course the 800 pound gorilla of bookselling. What was an independent publisher doing in bed with it?

Barnes and Noble canceled its initial order and has decided not to stock the book in any of its stores, making it available only on B&N.com and by special order. Only one independent bookseller did likewise. In an open letter to the bookseller community, Margo appealed for perspective, and argued that the Amazon launch strategy was designed to build interest in the book initially, creating the demand that would result in strong sales in all retail outlets. With an expanded pie, there would be more book sales for everyone. And the market would hardly be exhausted in two weeks.

As the author, I am hardly a neutral party. I’d like to see this book have real influence, as well as some nice sales. Whether Obama is a transformative president or another cautious incrementalist will determine whether we return to an economy of shared prosperity. And as a transforming figure who promises real improvement in the economy, he is more likely to get elected in the first place.

However, as an economic journalist who has written about publishing industry, I am intrigued by this controversy and its implications.

MORE...

President Medvedev has agreed to leave Georgia, but the Army is taking its own sweet time:

Russian forces detained 21 Georgian soldiers in the Black Sea port of Poti on Tuesday. On a day when Russian troops continued to dig in to positions across Georgia, the detention of the troops -- who were bound and blindfolded -- was further evidence of continued military activity on Georgian territory by Russia despite assurances that its troops would withdraw. The Georgian soldiers were taken by the Russians to a military base at Senaki, along with five armored American Humvees that were due to be shipped back to the United States.

Like Gori, Poti is well within Georgian territory. Nevertheless, the Russian Army continues to occupy both cities under the argument that occupation is necessary to secure access to South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russia also appears to be deploying SS-21 tactical ballistic missiles to Georgia. These are battlefield weapons, but deployment in South Ossetia puts them well within range of Tbilisi. The deployment of the ballistic missiles might have something to do with the unsatisfactory performance of the Russian Air Force, which lost somewhere between six and nineteen aircraft during the war.

--Robert Farley

Shorter David Brooks: The American people have forced John McCain to run a dishonorable campaign. Especially -- gasp -- those young journalists!

McCain started out with the same sort of kibitzing campaign style that he used to woo the press back in 2000. ... This time there were too many cameras around and too many 25-year-old reporters and producers seizing on every odd comment to set off little blog scandals. ... McCain and his advisers realized the only way they could get TV attention was by talking about the subject that interested reporters most: Barack Obama. ... McCain and his advisers have been compelled to adjust to the hostile environment around them. They have been compelled, at least in their telling, to abandon the campaign they had hoped to run. Now they are running a much more conventional race, the kind McCain himself used to ridicule.

Boy. For a little while there, I thought there might have been some problem with Saint John's message, or the fact thatt lobbyists run his campaign, or even that his tired, Bush III policy proposals weren't attractive. But now I know it's my fault -- all of our fault! I'm just picturing John McCain physically beating what remains of American political dignity, shouting "don't make me hurt you any more!"

--Tim Fernholz

I'm not going to put a lot of stock in markets that see Biden as the most likely nominee -- they have Kerry at 9%, after all -- but this does seem to be the consensus. And perhaps I've been buttered up by the fairly dismal alternatives being offered, but like Steve I find Biden a surprisingly decent option. At a minimum, he's strongly preferable to Kaine or Bayh, infinitely preferable to Nunn or Hagel, and clearly behind (among vaguely viable candidates) only Sebelius and Reed.

Cohn has a good roundup of the strengths (most domestic policy, brains, legislative accomplishments, crucial role in the immensely important defeat of Bork) and weaknesses (gaffe prone, his botching of the Thomas hearings.) It is, I think, fair to note that a Delaware senator's support for the bankruptcy bill is as inevitable as candidates in the Iowa caucuses supporting ethanol. I wouldn't give Biden a pass, exactly, but Bayh cast the same vote with considerably less excuse. To the list of defects, though, I would add a lack of executive experience and his initial support for the invasion of Iraq (although, again, on the latter issue his problems are much less severe than Bayh's). On the other hand, while it might be a minor political liability, I think the old "plagiarism" charges are of little substantive significance -- the idea of "plagiarism" in a context where nobody expects you to write your own words in the first place is nonsensical.

If I thought the VP choice should be determined by political considerations, I would pass; his penchant for saying silly things and hailing from a small, safe state would rule him out. Since I think the VP pick should be primarily substantive, however, I think he would be decent -- he could play a constructive policy role comparable to Gore and is considerably more progressive than most of his assumed rivals for the job. He wouldn't be at the top of my list, but of the InTrade top 3 he's the best by a huge margin.

--Scott Lemieux

• Weekend Update: The New York Times reports on Obama's strange negligence of Arkansas as an electoral target despite it's demographics potentially favoring Democrats. And and examination of John McCain's post-9/11 foreign policy worldview. See also Tim and Adam on the latter.
• Barack Obama raised $51 million in July. It's not a record-breaking amount by his standards, but it's almost twice the amount raised by McCain in the same period. Additionally, the DNC outraised the RNC for the first time this election cycle, $27.7 to 26 million.
• Joe Biden, who went to Georgia as an Obama surrogate over the weekend, is the current VP frontrunner according to the D.C. gossip machine, in a week where Obama is certain to make the pick public. Or he might do it during the convention. Or right before. But soon, we promise! In other grist for the rumor mill, the pick, whoever he or she is, is already staffed up in Chicago, according to The Washington Post's Sleuth blog.
• I think the significance of the Saddleback McCain/Obama/Warren Q&A this weekend is being overstated -- certainly a minority opinion amongst my TAPPED colleagues. However, Taegan Goddard has an excellent question for McCain: "During his weekend interview with Rev. Rick Warren, Sen. John McCain said that if he were president he would have never nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, David Souter or John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court. McCain wasn't a senator when Stevens was nominated, but why did he nevertheless vote to confirm Ginsburg, Breyer, and Souter?"
• I've always suspected that field organizing, voter registration and the turnout ground game were Obama's ace in the whole, and this Post story on voter registration in Virginia in the last four years validates, in my mind, Obama's recognition and expansion of the 50-state strategy Howard Dean has crafted as DNC Chairman.
• Politico's weekend story quoting Rep. Loretta Sanchez saying Hillary Clinton could have at least half of the House delegation in her pocket at the Democratic National Convention next week is pretty much all hot air, as DemConWatch helpfully points out in this post. In other convention news, John McCain plans on running advertising during the DNC, in a move that breaks with recent election tradition.
• Things are definitely tightening up in the polls. Both Colorado and Ohio -- one of which Obama has to win to get 270 electoral votes -- are trending towards McCain, with a new Public Policy Polling survey [PDF] of Ohio showing a 45-45 dead heat between the two candidates, 11 percent undecided. In Colorado, a Rocky Mountain News/CBS4 News poll has McCain ahead 44-41.
• In their ongoing efforts to dominate how we get our information, Google now has an 2008 Election page that allows users to track the political conversation in a comprehensive and fairly sophisticated manner.
• And Finally, LA Gov. Bobby Jindal, would be savior of the GOP, can't name one big new idea the Republican Party or John McCain are offering the country during a Meet the Press appearance. I suppose his non-answer is at some level an honest one. In related news, Newt Gingrich, intellectual lion of the conservative movement, claims that Obama's encouragement of proper tire inflation actually serves to "enrich big oil" because selling air has "a higher profit margin than selling gasoline." Now that's some solid conservative populism.

--Mori Dinauer

Sarah clarifies her response to my post:

[B]y accepting his invitation, and by agreeing to terms that were set up by Warren and Warren alone, the candidates were acquiescing to him being the arbiter of what the important political and theological questions are (and that it's proper to pose theological questions to political candidates in the first place).

But they are doing no such thing. By attending, the two candidates aren't saying that Warren is the only arbiter of these questions any more than letting Brian Williams moderate a debate makes him the only arbiter of what's important. What they're saying, rightly, is that Warren represents an important interest group that they need to engage with. Attending to various special interest groups special concerns is part and parcel of running for President.

Why not other faiths? Both candidates have already genuflected before AIPAC, offering their support for a critical issue to many Jewish-American voters. Other religious groups are either fairly divided, too small, or not interested enough in politics to host a similar panel. From a progressive point of view, it's too bad that evangelicals are simply the largest and best-organized politicized voting group.

It's one thing if you take issue with the fact that conservative Christians are, once again, an influential voting bloc -- as a liberal Catholic, I hate that they set the standard for what Christianity and faith mean in the public square. But, it's a whole different -- and wrong -- argument to act as though either candidate is responsible for creating Warren's status or as if Warren is somehow crazy to be highlighting his priorities when candidates appear at his forum. Both Obama and McCain are just acknowledging and dealing with a political reality. Finally, some, if not many, of Warren's questions were important, no matter what faith you are.

--Tim Fernholz

The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma runs a program, Ochberg Fellowships, for journalists, editors and photographers who cover traumatic incidents and violence. I was an Ochberg Fellow last year, and I got to meet Margarita Akhvlediani. She was a perfect fit for our group: Super-nice, smart, accomplished -- and she had seen the world's troubles in her career as a journalist writing about Georgia in the early 1990s. (Other fellows that year include Donna Alvis-Banks, who covered the Virginia Tech massacre, and James MacMillan, who had worked as a photographer in Iraq.) We all met up for several days in Baltimore, and Margarita was especially fun to hang out with. One evening, we went for crab cakes in the neighborhood and talked about Putin, Russia and (my hero) investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot and killed outside her Moscow apartment building in October 2006.

Recently, Margarita was attacked while on a reporting trip. She had been headed towards Gori when she was assaulted, and she has written about her experiences for The Nation. She was not targeted, as many journalists (such as Politkovskaya) have been. It was an ordinary mugging, ending with a robbery (her camera was taken), nothing more.

In the grand scheme of things, a missing camera means little. Still, the attack is a reminder of what things are like for people, especially reporters, in Georgia. This morning, I got an email from a former Ochberg fellow, saying the Dart Society has started a fund, Journalists Helping Journalists, for Margarita. In many ways, she is like any other journalist I know -- out every day trying to explain some small part of the world. Except unlike most of my journalist friends, she lives in a place that is marked by near anarchy – and exists in the shadow of Putin. Her work deserves attention.

--Tara McKelvey

I'm sort of shocked at the obviousness of Ann Althouse's realization that when Obama said that the question of when a fetus becomes a person was "above his pay grade," he was referring to G_d. Now, via Andrew Sullivan we find out that the Pope doesn't have an answer either. Nevertheless, Mark Hemingway at NRO insists that "There's not a job on the planet above the pay grade of the President of the United States," including unilaterally deciding the answers to questions that stump religious leaders across the world.

This is in line with the emerging Right Wing view that in the President is not merely vested with the authority of the state but the heavens as well. That is, as long as he's a Republican. At least they're consistent. Since we're finding that there are no laws made by man that a Republican chief executive is bound to respect, it was only a matter of time before the President's authority absconded its earthly limits.

-- A. Serwer

Former TAP intern-extraordinaire and recent Ezra Klein guest blogger Dylan Matthews has a rundown of the 15 Obama staffers you should know.

Also, check out our interview with Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL).

As always, consider subscribing to our RSS feed so you can get notice of articles as we publish them.

--The Editors

Tim thinks I exaggerate Rick Warren's role in the presidential forum Saturday night. He's not, as Tim suggests, just some pastor who decided to invite the presidential candidates to a forum at his church, and somehow got them to accept. He's one of the most influential evangelicals in America, according to virtually every measure of such things, and the candidates agreed to go to his church because they recognize that he's got enormous status.

The problem with that is why Warren, and not a rabbi? Why Warren and not a non-evangelical? Why didn't Warren invite an interfaith panel of religious leaders to pose questions? Why did he get to decide what all the important questions were? The fact that the candidates agreed to the forum on Warren's terms shows they've acquiesced to his status and how his event could, as Warren's own post-forum press release put it, "change the face of American politics."

Update: In his post, Tim wrote that "no one anointed" Warren, "he just held a debate and invited candidates to come." I didn't mean to suggest that Tim doesn't think Warren is an influential figure. I just meant to highlight that by accepting his invitation, and by agreeing to terms that were set up by Warren and Warren alone, the candidates were acquiescing to him being the arbiter of what the important political and theological questions are (and that it's proper to pose theological questions to political candidates in the first place).

--Sarah Posner

Yes, he did. In an interview with Beliefnet's Dan Gilgoff after his civic forum, Rick Warren said that "If they [evangelicals] think that life begins at conception, then that means that there are 40 million Americans who are not here [because they were aborted] that could have voted. They would call that a holocaust and for them it would like if I'm Jewish and a Holocaust denier is running for office. I don't care how right he is on everything else, it's a deal breaker for me. I'm not going to vote for a Holocaust denier."

Warren also told Gilgoff that Democrats' efforts to talk about faith alone fall flat: "just because a person can say 'God' and 'Jesus' and 'salvation' and whatever doesn't mean they have a worldview. And people want to know what do they believe, not just their personal faith."

--Sarah Posner

From the new print issue, Dana Goldstein and Ezra Klein explain how Barack Obama has made the Democratic party his own:

Though Obama himself is a newcomer to Washington, the upper echelons of his Senate and campaign staff are populated almost exclusively by experienced Democratic Party operatives. Continuity with the established party infrastructure is a defining characteristic of the Obama campaign. When Hillary Clinton conceded the nomination, Obama’s first major staff change was not the incorporation of a former Clinton operative meant to heal the divisions of the primary, nor the elevation of a national-security graybeard meant to reassure general-election voters of Obama’s commander-in-chief credentials. Rather, it was to install Paul Tewes, the skilled organizer who served as the architect of Obama’s crucial victory in Iowa, at the DNC to head up the committee’s election-year efforts. A few weeks later, it was announced that the DNC would cease accepting contributions from lobbyists or political action committees.

Then it came out that much of the DNC was moving to Chicago. In the months that have followed, the Obama campaign has announced plans for training camps that will turn out thousands of new organizers dedicated to electing Democrats, and has signaled that it will spend millions in blood-red states where Democrats haven’t seriously invested in building party infrastructure for decades. The campaign has constructed a fundraising machine based around small-donors that promises to end the age-old competition for dollars between different wings of the Democratic establishment, enabling the creation of a unified electoral strategy. It has argued that “real change” requires the sort of legislative successes that only a strong congressional party can produce. In short, the candidate running on his exhaustion with traditional party politics has directed his campaign to build a new kind of Democratic Party—one that may put to shame anything that came before it.

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—The Editors

Critiques of Obama's performance at Saddleback are coming in fast and furious, and most of them are negative. But I'd ignore those and instead go with Noam Scheiber's take, and this one. Nobody expected the evangelicals at this forum to declare themselves fervent Democrats after Obama's Q & A. Instead he sought, and I think succeed, at showing middle-of-the-road voters that he can relate to them. He also may have managed to dampen enthusiasm among evangelicals -- it's hard to fervently hate someone you've hosted in your church. While the performance may not have been his best, Obama did strike a lot of good notes.

In her response, Sarah Posner points to "the whole problem of anointing a pastor the arbiter of a presidential forum -- or the arbiter of elections in general." But that's a pretty big exaggeration. No one anointed him either thing, he just held a debate and invited candidates to come. Religious leaders are big players in civil society in this country because in many areas people want them to be. Looking at the questions, Warren didn't seem too much worse than some of the past journalistic moderators or the moderator at any special-interest organized event. Progressives can either ignore that religious leaders are influential, rail against Warren's role and alienate evangelicals, or they can try to engage religious people. I think Obama made the right choice.

One last thing via Andrew: Mark Hemingway demonstrates ably how evangelicals are used by the GOP without being understood or respected. Hemingway heard Obama say that determining the moment of conception is "above his pay grade" and responded, "News flash: There's not a job on the planet above the pay grade of the President of the United States." News flash right back at ya, Mark: Any person of faith is going to tell you there is at least one job above that pay grade -- can you guess who fills it? As Andrew points out, even the Pope doesn't feel that the Catholic Church can decide that question. Evangelicals are obviously going to disagree with the substance of Obama's answer, but they may well respect his humility before the Lord.

--Tim Fernholz

It would be really nice if John McCain ever displayed the pre-9/11 "cool-eyed caution" attributed to him by "his critics" in the New York Times article quoted by Tim below (the Times could only find people who preempt their criticisms of McCain with praise). But as Matthew Yglesias pointed out last week, McCain was calling for ground troops in Serbia in 1999. Stop me if this sounds familiar:

''In Pyongyang and Baghdad and Tripoli, they are paying close attention,'' he said in an interview on Friday. ''And if a military establishment that was defeated by the Croatian Army prevails, one led by a Balkan thug prevails, then we will be vulnerable to many challenges in many places.'

The only way to keep America safe apparently, is to invade whatever country is available so as to prove we aren't weak. This attitude is how bullies end up with so much lunch money and so little actual respect.

As time has gone on, McCain has shuffled the names of the countries and the thugs, but the basic solutions remain the same. The attacks of 9/11 weren't an "awakening" for McCain, who suddenly realized that only strong military intervention could protect the country, in fact, it's probably more accurate to say 9/11 didn't change the way McCain thinks about anything. It might make for good copy to say he was deeply changed by 9/11, but that simply isn't true. The McCain Doctrine has been around for awhile now -- long enough that political reporters and critics should be expected to have some familiarity with the contours of McCain's foreign policy beliefs.

-- A. Serwer

That John McCain was not, in fact, locked within a "cone of silence" during Rick Warren's questioning of Barack Obama on Saturday points to the whole problem of anointing a pastor the arbiter of a presidential forum -- or the arbiter of elections in general. A lot of the people pushing for the event in the first place were Democrats and Obama supporters -- and I don't think their cause was helped in the end.

Making Warren the arbiter let him ask questions like the one he posed about a recent poll that showed that 70% of Americans believe that faith-based organizations can solve social problems better than the government can. Who conducted that poll? How was the question phrased? Who were the respondents? No one asks, no one requires Warren to substantiate it. Warren is a pastor, so he's implicitly trusted to be fair and forthright.

While Obama was thought to have had the most to gain from the forum, he performed terribly -- mushy was the adjective that leapt to mind. Even his posture was hunched, like he didn't really believe some of the things he was saying. It's a hazard in part created by the campaign's overly enthusiastic effort to reach out to evangelicals. Because Obama wants so badly to reach those coveted evangelical voters, he was willing to submit himself to an environment in which he couldn't be unabashedly pro-choice, where he felt like he had to elevate the work of unaccountable faith-based organizations above government and secular NGOs, and where he had to pontificate on the nature of evil. It might have been billed as brave for a Democrat to step into a potentially hostile environment like that but Obama didn't rise to the occasion by coming across as tough, firm, and passionate in his beliefs. Showing your Christian values doesn't mean you have to be so genial and accommodating that you fail to come across as a leader.

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Eds. Note: Founding Editor Bob Kuttner has just released a new book, Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency. It's already receiving wide acclaim; Hendrik Hertzberg writes that it is "riveting, brilliant, and persuasive," though he neglects to mention either Bob's dashing good looks or air of mystery. In any case, Bob will be blogging about the book and on economic issues in the campaign until the election. We'll bring you those posts here on TAPPED.

The Dodd-Frank bill to brake the collapse in housing values, signed by a reluctant President Bush just three weeks ago, is already far too weak to fix what’s broken. The latest statistics are staggering. According to the firm RealtyTrac, there were 271,171 foreclosures recorded just in July. The Congressional Budget Office estimates, not disputed by Senator Dodd and Congressman Frank, project that their bill, now law, will save just 400,000 homes from foreclosure over the next three years. Two to three million mortgages are projected to default this year along.

And the problem is not just the foreclosures, but the effect on the broader housing market and on consumer purchasing power. Since most of the net worth of middle income Americans is their home equity, innocent people are being wiped out financially.

Both Frank and Dodd tried for much stronger legislation, but were stymied both by Republican resistance and by opposition from the Democrats’ own Blue Dog Caucus of fiscal conservatives. Frank now says that much stronger medicine will be needed. More money to guarantee refinancings. More money for local governments and nonprofits to buy foreclosed properties, and get them re-occupied with first-time owners and renters, so that abandoned houses don’t drag down property values next door and in the surrounding neighborhoods.

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A big, incoherent piece in the Times over the weekend almost, but not quite, shows how McCain's foreign policy is crazy. Immediately after 9/11, McCain went around telling everyone that "this is war," and by October 2001 he had picked Iraq as the only way top stop Al Qaeda, making his case for invasion six months before the Bush Administration did. Then we have this:

To his admirers, Mr. McCain’s tough response to Sept. 11 is at the heart of his appeal. They argue that he displayed the same decisiveness again last week in his swift calls to penalize Russia for its incursion into Georgia, in part by sending peacekeepers to police its border.

His critics charge that the emotion of Sept. 11 overwhelmed his former cool-eyed caution about deploying American troops without a clear national interest and a well-defined exit, turning him into a tool of the Bush administration in its push for a war to transform the region.

But the Times never sees fit to mention that Al Qaeda and 9/11 had nothing to do with Iraq, because that would actually help their readers understand that McCain was wrong and that he made a bad judgment call that put our troops lives on the line. There are no shades of gray here! This is one big reason why the American electorate succumbs to a strong-and-wrong foreign policy -- the news media has such a hard time pointing out the wrong part. And now McCain is trying to do the same thing all over again with Georgia.

--Tim Fernholz

Despite the denials of the past few weeks, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf resigned after being faced with impeachment from Pakistan's ruling parliamentary majority. Part of the deal is immunity from prosecution and guaranteed safe passage out of Pakistan. On Fox News Sunday this weekend, Condoleezza Rice said there were no plans to offer Musharraf asylum here. Musharraf said he was resigning "in the nation's interest" and denied any wrongdoing.

The Bush policy towards Pakistan made it seem like the United States was more committed to keeping Musharraf in power than pursuing a functioning democracy, and so the United States might be in a weaker position than it could have been in terms of a relationship with Pakistan's future leader, who is likely to be one of the leaders of the two majority parties. Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party, holds the most seats. In many ways, this is simply the culmination of a series of events that started when she was assassinated last year. Bhutto's son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, told the AFP in reaction to Musharraaf's resignation that "democracy is the best revenge." Given the potential problems that could be created from the rivalry between Zadari's father Asif Ali Zardari and former president Nawaz Sharif, let's hope everyone feels that way.

-- A. Serwer

Via Lauren Williams at Stereohyped, The New York Times' Freakanomics blog seems intent on calling into serious doubt its methodology with some of it's conclusions about "mixed-race childen."

• Mixed-race kids grow up in households that are similar along many dimensions to those in which black children grow up: similar incomes, the father is much less likely to be around than in white households, etc.

• In terms of academic performance, mixed-race kids fall in between blacks and whites.

• Mixed-race kids do have one advantage over white and black kids: the mixed-race kids are much more attractive on average.

The really interesting result, though, is the next one:

• There are some bad adolescent behaviors that whites do more than blacks (like drinking and smoking), and there are other bad adolescent behaviors that blacks do more than whites (watching TV, fighting, getting sexually transmitted diseases). Mixed-race kids manage to be as bad as whites on the white behaviors and as bad as blacks on the black behaviors. Mixed-race kids act out in almost every way measured in the data set.

If you're like me, you're just a little bit curious about how exactly Steve Levitt and his buddies measured the relative "attractiveness" of its subjects. Not that Daniel and I are contesting that conclusion as it relates to ourselves, but we just kind of feel like asking the interviewer to rate the subject on a scale of 1-5, the method described in the survey, just isn't very scientific.

We haven't read the entire report yet, but we're both pretty skeptical of scientific surveys whose conclusions are remarkably similar to stereotypes that predate the Confederacy, like "If we had to pick an explanation that best fits the facts, it would be the old sociology model of mixed-race individuals as the “marginal man”: not part of either racial group and therefore torn by inner conflict," and "Mixed race adolescents – not having a natural peer group – need to engage in more risky behaviors to be accepted." Get it? Your "natural peer group" includes only those people who look like you.

It's true. We often get terribly anxious about mundane decisions that are infused with existential racial meaning, like whether we're going to have fried chicken or gefiltefish for lunch.

-- A. Serwer and Daniel Strauss