Matt Yglesias

Good News

I think increasing sales volume and falling prices is about the best news we could expect from the housing market. Given how expensive homes had gotten, there was really no alternative but for us to see some steep declines. There’s no use, in that sense, of crying over spilled milk. Home prices are traditionally “sticky” but it would be very bad for the economy for home-sellers to refuse to bow to reality and lower prices. It’s worth trying to do mass mortgage re-writes to avoid a plague of foreclosures and vacant buildings that could wreck neighborhoods and cause prices to overshoot on the downside, but prices need to fall. Beyond that, I think the best we can hope for is high sales volumes that let us re-allocate our resources more efficiently.

Thought of the Day

Lots of Senate speculation, including speculation about getting to 60 votes and speculation about stripping Joe Lieberman of his committee chairmanship. I’ve heard less speculation about what John McCain will do. He’s an old man, and by all accounts is neither well-liked by his Senate GOP colleagues nor does he like them. Is it so implausible that he’ll just retire after the election; take his toys and go home to one of his eight homes? His successor, appointed by Janet Napolitano, would presumably be a Democrat. Maybe to balance things out, he and Lieberman can simultaneously retire (Connecticut’s governor is a Republican), and ride off into the sunset together.

Weekend Voting

Steve Israel and Norm Ornstein correctly note that it would make a lot of sense to shift Election Day to a Saturday and then make special provision for the small number of observant Jews, Muslims, and Seventh-Day Adventists (with early voting increasingly popular and widespread, you wouldn’t need a big adjustments). This would be more convenient for most people and greatly enhance turnout.

You can see more on this at Why Tuesday? where, among other things, they make the point that the tradition of Tuesday voting is based on considerations that have absolutely nothing to do with modern conditions. Voting on Tuesday is, along with the electoral college and the filibuster, a dumb anachronism that we ought to do away with as quickly as possible.

What Children Need

Apropos of this post this morning, Sara showed me the Department of Agriculture’s annual study on what people spend on children. There are a lot of difference ins-and-outs of these factors, but to make a long story short, a typical two-parent, two-child middle class family spends between $20,000-$25,000 per year on their minor children. This table sums up some of the estimates:

By contrast, a family of four living at the poverty line has a total income of $21,200 a year which, as you can see, is more than what you need to spend to give middle class kids what they need. And that’s not just a trivia fact — sixteen percent of American children live in households that are below the poverty line. A single-mom working full-time at a job that pays $7.25 (what the minimum wage will be after recent increases full phase-in) earns just $15,080 in a year and conservatives think that’s too much money. Unless we manage to, yes, spread some of the wealth around so that these kids can have their needs met, the idea that we’re going to substitute equal opportunity for worrying about the income distribution is a joke.

Doing Something

Press release in my inbox about this AIG/transit mess:

Today, U.S. Senator Robert Menendez, along with Senators Richard Durbin (D-IL), Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) are calling on Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to prevent a potentially crippling financial situation that transit agencies are facing as a result of the credit crisis. The collapse of insurance giant AIG has caused deals between banks and transit agencies to fall apart, allowing banks to demand billions of dollars from the agencies.

“Any reduction or degradation in transit service could mean that our constituents will struggle getting to work or school, squeezing our state economies and family budgets even further,” wrote the senators. “This is a time when we should encourage mass transit use and a financial blow to our transit agencies such as this one is a major setback to that effort”

The senators, who represent states with major public transit systems, called on the Treasury and Federal Reserve to each appoint senior officials to work with the Department of Transportation and large transit agencies in developing a solution that will avoid a fiscal crisis for the agencies. The issue stems from leasing arrangements between transit agencies and banks in which the banks purchased transit infrastructure and leased it back to the agencies. AIG served as an intermediary in these transactions. The collapse of AIG left its credit rating in tatters, which banks have exploited to invalidate the deals and demand full payment up front from the transit agencies.

Text of the letter can be read here. Not sure what kind of effort led by Senators “who represent states with major public transit systems” is missing Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer. And of course Dick Durbin’s not the only Senator from Illinois.

Bush Picks a Successor

McCain is totally different from Bush, will change things, is an independent maverick, etc., etc., etc., and yet somehow George and Laura Bush just went and voted for McCain.

Scheunemann: Obama Was Palling Around With Terrorists

Marc Ambinder reported this morning that there’s an anti-Palin faction developing within the McCain campaign composed, I suppose, of people who think that Mitt Romney’s deep pockets are the way to go for 2012:

This faction has come to believe that Palin, perhaps unwittingly subconsciously or otherwise, has begun to play Sen. McCain off of the base, consistently and deliberately departed from the campaign’s message of the day in ways that damage McCain. (”palling around with terrorists” was a line that escaped HQ’s vetting… Palin’s criticism of the campaign for pulling out of Michigan was greeted by anger internally… Palin’s expressed opinion that Rev. Wright is a legitimate issue — which subtly knocks McCain for not raising it — was perceived as an attempt to preemptively blame McCain’s wobbliness for his loss, which would theoretically enhance Palin’s standing with the base.) The complaints extend all the back to Palin’s vice presidential vetting. Major disclosures, issue positions and associations did not come up, and the campaign was so overwhelmed with new information early on, it largely abandoned an effort to defend them individually. This is the claim, anyway. For the record, senior adviser Mark Salter, accurately identified everywhere as the aide who is closest to McCain, calls this scenario “bullshit.”

By contrast, Randy Scheunemann, chief McCain foreign policy adviser, C-List neocon, and lobbyist for foreign powers, writes in to Ambinder to clarify that he agrees with me and Salter that Palin is likely to be the 2012 nominee:

Just read your post. This is on the record. This is cleared by HQ. It is a fact that Barack Obama was palling around with terrorists. It was a fact before Governor Palin said it in a fully vetted speech and it is fact today. It is bullshit to claim or write anything else.

I think the claim that having a passing acquaintanceship with Bill Ayers is well-described as “palling around with [multiple] terrorists” is hard to defend. Of course it would be interesting to compare the number of innocent people who died violently as a result of Ayers’ actions with the number of innocent people who died violently as a result of George W. Bush’s policies. We can even restrict the Bush analysis to the number of people tortured to death in contravention of international law (“[o]ver a hundred documented deaths have occurred in these interrogation sessions”) and I’m still pretty sure Ayers comes out ahead.

The Hoax

I didn’t want to blog about this business because it seemed like a hoax but it would be unseemly to accuse a victim of perpetrating a hoax just based on general intuition. But for the record, Ashley Todd has admitted she was lying about the idea that a black man mugged her, sexually assaulted her, and scratched a “B” into her cheek because she had a McCain bumper sticker on her car. Matt Corley observes that before the hoax was exposed, Fox News Executive VP John Moody, a Pittsburgh native, had some provocative thoughts on the matter:

If Ms. Todd’s allegations are proven accurate, some voters may revisit their support for Senator Obama, not because they are racists (with due respect to Rep. John Murtha), but because they suddenly feel they do not know enough about the Democratic nominee.

If the incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain’s quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting.

Of course the McCain campaign could have done the smart thing and stayed circumspect about this until all the facts were in. But instead they decided to try and exploit it.

Happy UN Day

Today is, apparently, UN Day. Patrick Barry celebrates by reminded us of John McCain’s goofy plan to replace the UN with a misguided “League of Democracies.”

The Case for Willkie

The New York Times has posted an interesting feature wherein you can read all of their presidential endorsements going back to Abraham Lincoln. They endorsed JFK over Nixon, and then since Civil Rights and realignment have been a solidly Democratic newspaper. But before that they were more idiosyncratic. I just read their 1940 endorsement of Wendell Willkie (following endorsements of FDR in ‘32 and ‘36 and also also of the lost cause Democrats of the 1920s) and except for a ludicrous outburst of balanced budget mania in Section III it’s pretty persuasive.

Don’t Tell Andy McCarthy

I almost hesitate to bring this up, for fear of throwing more kindling on the right-wing fire, but yesterday’s post on my ties to radicalism including the Working Families Party, Todd Gitlin, and PvdA led someone to draw my attention to JS We Can! which is both a clever multilingual pun, and an insidious plot to bring America to its knees.

You see, PvdA has a youth arm. And it’s called Jongen Socialisten, or young socialists. And in Dutch “JS” is pronounced sort of like “yes” in English. Hence, “JS we can!” a website that is, quite literally, an effort by foreign young socialists to elect Barack Obama. It seems they’ve got Dutch exchange students canvassing for Obama in Pennsylvania and everything. Personally, I love Dutch socialists (and it should be noted that PvdA took a “third way” turn like UK Labour in the nineties and isn’t really a socialist party anymore) but I’m not sure how well this kind of thing would play in middle America.

Foiled by the Blue Dogs

The other day, Eve Fairbanks wrote:

Yes, the Democrats are poised to expand their House majority — but by electing conservative Democrats who, in some cases, have ideologically more in common with John McCain than with Nancy Pelosi. These conservative Democrats — many of whose districts will vote McCain — won’t feel that they owe Obama, will be well-organized as a faction under the “Blue Dog” banner, and, if their actions in the 110th are any indicator, won’t shirk from bucking their party’s leadership.

There’s an important element of truth to this. But one should recognize that it’s not as true as some people seem to think. Substantial Democratic House gains will make for a much more progressive House of Representatives even if the bulk of the new members are relatively conservative Blue Dogs. Note for one thing that according to DW-NOMINATE the parties are currently perfectly sorted and the most conservative Democrat (Rep. Barrow of Georgia) is more progressive than the most liberal Republican (Rep. Gilchrest of Maryland). So replacing any number of Republicans with Barrow clones would still make the House more progressive. And of course not all the new members will be Blue Dogs. In 2006, the conservative-to-moderate Democrats who picked up seats in conservative-to-moderate districts got all the press, but you also had several examples of liberals beating moderate Republicans in moderate districts and that will happen again in 2008.

Beyond that, at the moment the 219th most liberal member of congress — the one who, generically, would be the last vote for progressive legislation — is Rep. Tanner of Tennessee. Tanner is a Blue Dog. And Tanner is also quite conservative. But “more Blue Dogs” and “More Tanners” are not equivalent. At the moment, only 16 Democratic Representatives (of which twelve are Blue Dogs) are to the right of Tanner. By contrast, there are 29 members of the Blue Dog caucus to the left of Tanner. And every new House member, whether Blue Dog or otherwise, who’s to the left of Tanner is pushing the median member to the left.

Rewatching

David Thompson says “The Godfather plays every year; The Sopranos in reruns will bore you.” Ross Douthat responds:

Well! The Godfather does play every year, but it’s also only three hours long, and thus a completely different artistic animal than The Sopranos, which clocks in roughly eighty hours when all is said and done. There’s no perfect analogy here, obviously, but on length alone it’s a little like comparing James Joyce’s “The Dead” to David Copperfield. Yes, Coppola’s masterpiece has a self-contained perfection to which a long-running television show simply can’t hope to aspire - and yes, as a result, there are episodes and even long swathes of David Chase’s show that bore upon reacquaintance, just as there are sections of Copperfield or War and Peace that I wouldn’t care to read and re-read every year. But trust me: I’m watching The Sopranos in re-runs right now, and as a cumulative experience - allowing for bumps and blind alleys and boredom along the way - it’s no less impressive than the first time or two I watched it.

Let me start off with the quick note that I took Fred Kaplan’s advice and recently rewatched the Godfather movies as re-released on Blu-Ray and was not disappointed. Ross is both right about this and also being somewhat too easy on The Sopranos. The relevant comparison here is to The Wire which, though not quite equal in length to The Sopranos, is comparable in scale. And the Wire, though I think it does flag a bit in seasons four and five, absolutely never stops feeling like a single coherent work that deserves to be watched uninterrupted from end to end. The Sopranos is extremely well-made television, but especially after season two it begins to get very “televisiony” — full of occasional digressions and sub-plots that feel like filler or stalling or efforts to spread screen time around rather than being crucial to the development of the story. If The Wire had never existed, one might be inclined to say that this is just intrinsic to the medium, but we while it is endemic to the medium we also know now that it’s avoidable.

Neoconservatism Today, Neoconservatism Tomorrow, Neoconservatism Forever!

Charles Krauthammer tries to refocus attention on national security issues:

The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.

This is a common conservative conceit — that progressive approaches to national security might be good enough if you don’t really care, but in a dangerous world you need to turn to conservative ideas. Here it’s instructive to consider the record. Even if you engage in the conservative conceit that George W. Bush deserves no blame for 9/11 even though his administration came into office and explicitly chose to put al-Qaeda on the back-burner, it can’t be said often enough that more Americans — and orders of magnitude more people — have died as a result of invading Iraq than died on 9/11. In non-proliferation terms, the situation is worse in Iran than it was when Bush took office. And the situation is much worse in North Korea than it was when Bush took office. Russia starting to push the limits of revanchism isn’t something that “just happened” it was a predictable — and, indeed, widely predicted — consequence of the Bush administration’s approach to Russia and general embrace of unilateralism. America’s standing in the eyes of the world is at its lowest ebb ever. Our level of influence in Latin America has declined precipitously on Bush’s watch. Israel’s security is more at risk than it was eight years ago, and Palestinian suffering is more intense than it was eight years ago. Osama bin Laden remains at large.

In March of 2001, Charles Krauthammer laid out the argument for a new approach to the world, one he believed — rightly — that George W. Bush would embrace:

In the liberal internationalist view of the world, the U.S. is merely one among many–a stronger country, yes, but one that has to adapt itself to the will and the needs of “the international community.” That is why the Clinton Administration was almost manic in pursuit of multilateral treaties–on chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear testing, proliferation. No matter that they could not be enforced. Our very signing would show us to be a good international citizen.

This is folly. America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms, alter expectations and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will.

We’ve been following Krauthammer’s advice for years. Has it delivered a peaceful and secure world? No, it has not. Not just according to me, but according to Krauthammer himself. To Krauthammer the “solution” to the peace and prosperity of the Clinton years was neoconservatism. With neoconservatism having created a dangerous and insecure world, his solution is — more neoconservatism. And yet somehow it’s supposed to be the people who want to stop pursuing failed policies who are said to be blind to the troubled nature of the present.

Regular Needs Children

It’s nice, I suppose, that Sarah Palin’s experience raising a special needs child has awakened her to the importance of generous public support for such children. And it’d also be nice to think that John McCain’s embrace of this issue reflects a genuine Palin-inspired awakening on his part, rather than a cynical recognition that standard conservative policies that would normally evade attention despite their hideously immoral consequences would be highlighted by the case of Trig Palin. And so good for them. Obviously, special needs children deserve to have their needs taken care of. But of course all children have a lot of needs. And the moral logic that supports taking care of the needs of children with special needs also, of course, supports the idea of supporting all children with their needs.

If one of John McCain’s children had a cavity, I’m sure McCain would have them go to the dentist. Same with Palin and her kids. And the same with every Republican member of congress. And they’d make sure their kids get regular dental checkups and tooth cleanings. That’s not a “special” need, but it’s a need. But if your parents are too poor to afford regular cleanings for your teeth, then you’re out of look as far as conservatives are concerned. That need’s not “special” enough. Or suppose you were hoping for a standard medical checkup? Well, conservatives are against expanding S-CHIP. Suppose you rely on Medicaid to pay for a doctor to take care of you when you’re sick? Well, states will be cutting back spending in the face of the recession and conservatives oppose efforts to have the federal government boost aid to the states. First Focus found that “real discretionary spending on children has declined by more than six percent since 2004″ under George W. Bush and McCain’s plan for large, across-the-board cuts in real discretionary spending would, of course, force further reductions.

What’s the justification for this? Its not that conservative politicians don’t understand that non-”special” children have substantial needs. You can see from the way they raise their own kids — just like all other prosperous families, they spend generously on them. But 16 percent of all children and twenty percent of children under the age of six live in households that are below the poverty line. A family of four is below the poverty line earning $21,200. If you’re a woman earning $21,200 a year and raising three children, you’re going to find that it’s really, really hard to take care of all your regular children’s regular needs. Note that as of July 24, 2009 the minimum wage will be $7.25 per hour which conservatives think is too high. If you work forty hours a week, for fifty-two weeks a year at $7.25 an hour you’ll take home $15,080 a year with which to take care of your regular children’s regular needs. Try to give you a refundable tax credit? Well, that’s welfare and we can’t have it.

It would be one thing if conservatives had the courage of their convictions and just said, “hey, government intervention in the economy is so terrible that we don’t care if children suffer.” But when you see candidates out there on the hustings talking about how we need to take care of special needs children, well, it makes me mad. Of course we need to take care of their needs. But kids, special and otherwise, need all kinds of stuff. They need decent childcare and nutritious food and they need to see doctors and dentists and they need clothing and they need decently maintained houses that are heated in the winter. They need parents with job opportunities and schedules that are flexible enough to take care of them. Nobody seriously denies that kids need this stuff. But lots of people are just indifferent to the fact that a huge proportion of our children don’t get their needs met. And it’s appalling. McCain says that rather than spreading the wealth around, he wants to have equal opportunity. But what kind of equal opportunity do have when mom’s pulling in $21,500 to support three kids and President McCain is slashing spending on child and family services left and right?

Bailwha?

Okay, now I’m mad:

Metro and 30 other transit agencies across the country may have to pay billions of dollars to large banks as years-old financing deals unravel, potentially hurting service for millions of bus and train riders, transit officials said yesterday.

The problems are an unexpected consequence of the credit crisis, triggered indirectly by the collapse of American International Group, the insurance giant that U.S. taxpayers recently rescued from bankruptcy, officials said.

AIG had guaranteed deals between transit agencies and banks under which the banks made upfront payments that the agencies agreed to repay over time. But AIG’s financial problems have invalidated the company’s guarantees, putting the deals in technical default and allowing the banks to ask for all their money at once.

Ryan Avent observes: “One might ask just what the hell was the point of giving AIG government credit worth $122 billion (and counting) if it wasn’t going to prevent the deals the firm guaranteed from falling apart.”

Yeah, I really do wonder about that. WTF is happening here? Can’t we, in exchange for all the money we’re giving AIG, force the company to keep guaranteeing deals that are vital to keeping our public services running? Something about the implementation of this bailout is very troubling and it doesn’t inspire a ton of confidence in the future of TARP.

How Did This Happen?

People have been stopping me on the street and saying “Matt! Matt! How come nobody’s made a brief web video explaining why this financial crisis is the right-wing’s fault?” Well, now it’s been done so go and behold CAPAF’s official finger-pointing video:

The video itself is just one part of the new How Did This Happen? website, a joint project of CAPAF and the Media Matters Action Network, dedicated to exploring the ideological origins of the financial crisis and debunking conservative efforts to dodge the blame for the consequences of recent years of conservative malgovernment.

Governance, Palin-Style

According to an LA Times investigation, she seems to have conducted business in Alaska in the best traditions of the Bush administration:

* More than 100 appointments to state posts — nearly 1 in 4 — went to campaign contributors or their relatives, sometimes without apparent regard to qualifications.

* Palin filled 16 state offices with appointees from families that donated $2,000 to $5,600 and were among her top political patrons.

* Several of Palin’s leading campaign donors received state-subsidized industrial development loans of up to $3.6 million for business ventures of questionable public value.

* Palin picked a donor to replace the public safety commissioner she fired. But the new top cop had to resign days later under an ethics cloud. And Palin drew a formal ethics complaint still pending against her and several aides for allegedly helping another donor and fundraiser land a state job.

Of course despite this she’s been super-popular in Alaska. That’s common in small states but also, I think, reflects the unique nature of Alaska politics. Basically, it’s this kind of nice conservative fantasyland where public ownership of valuable natural resources (but don’t call it socialism) combined with huge net transfers from the federal government (but don’t call it socialism) and a small population, combine to create a where somehow everything can go smoothly without such inconveniences as taxes or competent administration of government. You can indulge in all kinds of wingnutty goodness and not suffer the consequences that would follow from trying this stuff in a more normal place.

Weld for Obama

Former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld endorses Barack Obama, joining Reps. Jim Leach and Wayne Gilchrest, General Colin Powell, and former Minnesota Governor Arne Carlson on the growing list of moderate Republicans jumping on the Obandwagon.

A Nuclear Boom

I would consider subsidies to the nuclear power industry a price worth paying to get a good carbon pricing bill through congress, but count me as extremely skeptical on the merits that large subsidies to the nuclear industry is actually the right way to tackle the challenge of climate change. That said, it seems that even absent such subsidies and absent carbon pricing, we’re seeing a revival of interest in building new nuclear plants for the first time in over thirty years. And I think at this point that I’d rather see new nuclear plants than new coal plants.

But one thing that I think tends to go missing from this conversation is that there are substantial national security concerns associated with a global increase in the use of nuclear power. Joe Cirincione has explained:

[A]nd finally, proliferation. It’s not the reactor that you’re worried about; it’s the stuff that goes into the reactor and the stuff that goes out. The same facility that can enrich uranium for fuel rods can enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.

This is the whole issue with Iran. They have an enrichment facility they say is for making fuel. Do you trust them? And if nuclear power is going to expand in the world, if we’re going to double or triple the nuclear reactors, then we’re going to double or triple the fuel factories. And these could spread to many other countries, bringing many other countries right up to the brink of nuclear weapons status. That’s an unacceptable threat. I actually think it’s immoral for companies and for countries to be promoting the expansion of nuclear power without taking steps to correct that national ownership of fuel facilities. The only way we’re going to be safe if there is a role for nuclear power, it’s got to be married with an internationalization of those fuel fabrication facilities.

Unlike with the waste issue, there’s actually a pretty clear solution. As Jeffrey Lewis argues you need to multinationalize the fuel cycle:

This would take some diplomatic heavy lifting (see details here) and require the US to be willing to actually submit ourselves to the same protocols as everyone else, but it’s totally feasible. And without doing it, every incremental expansion of nuclear power makes it much harder to forestall the out-of-control spread of nuclear weapons.

Rachel Maddow Gets Awesomer

And yet it happens:

Biggest misconception about pundits: That we all hang out together. I don’t know any of these people. Maybe all the pundits are hanging out and not inviting me. […]

By her bed: Comic books. I read comics sometimes and graphic novels. I appreciate that genre.

I know a lot of pundits here in DC who I bet would be happy to hang out with Maddow and talk graphic novels. Just saying.

Don’t Know Much About the Budget

John McCain likes to run around the country touting his neo-Hooverite spending freeze, but it seems that almost every time he’s challenged on a specific program, he decides to exempt that one. Now we can add NASA to the list. Ali Frick rounds up all the various exemptions and reminds us that we’ve seen this before when he decided to back off promises to eliminate aid to Israel and cut military housing programs under the aegis of earmark reduction.

Change You Can Believe In?

Scott McClellan joins Ken Adelman on the list of Obama endorsers that will probably do more to raise doubts in progressives’ minds than anything else. Still, McClellan wrote a contrite book. Adelman remains baffling.

The Maestro

Wow. You don’t hear admissions like this every day:

“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” Mr. Greenspan said.

Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.”

Mr. Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Mr. Waxman said.

“Absolutely, precisely,” Mr. Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

Greenspan is, of course, hardly unique in having been mistaken about some important public policy issues. He was, however, an unusually powerful official — arguably the second most important member of the government after the president — for an unusually long time. But beyond that, for a long time he managed to acquire an air of infallibility about him that was totally unique among political figures. He was treated as an oracle to be interpreted, not as an official to be scrutinized. It was, I think, a strange and unhealthy moment in the life of our country. At the end of the day, appointing people so brilliant that they’re never wrong about anything isn’t a real option in terms of thinking about ways to run the government.

The Reggie Love Factor

Huh. It seems that Carlos Boozer actually has weighed-in on the election:

One of Jazz All-Star forward Carlos Boozer’s former teammates at Duke University is Barack Obama’s personal assistant Reggie Love, a relationship that helped pave the way for Boozer to chat one-on-one recently with the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.

“I had a chance to meet (Obama) in Miami about three weeks ago, and I had a talk with him for about 10 or 15 minutes,” said Boozer, who — though he was raised in Alaska, the home of Republican Party candidate for vice president Sarah Palin — is a big Obama backer.

“He’s so impressive,” added Boozer, a two-time U.S. Olympian who won gold in China earlier this year with Team USA. “He (Obama) has this incredible aura about him. The way he talks, I want that guy leading my country.”

So there you have it. Of course I assume the NBA player demographic tilts heavily in Obama’s favor, even if not every player has specifically remarked on the election.