I hear there's an election next week. How do I know? Every media outlet this side of the Vladivostok Daily Bugle (VladBugle.com) can't shut up about it. The Tea Party. Yammer yammer yammer. Feckless Democrats. Yammer yammer yammer. Odd behavior. Yammer. Odder ideas. Yammer yammer. Palin. Driscoll. Angle. Paladino. Yowza! As far as I can tell, there hasn't been a new thought on this affair for months. Obama's paying for the recession, for stubborn unemployment, for bailouts, for his brains, slim physique and anti-colonialist forebears. Bailouts were payoffs. The crisis was not a crisis, but a fantasy conjured up by Wall Street. Obama is a socialist dictator to the right and Clintonian triangulater to the left. And Obama's not even technically running.
In some ways it's been a relief to dip into the pink pages of the Financial Times, which has spent the week cogitating on the election in its op-ed pages. It's a relief for two reasons: First, the FT takes a welcome break from its endless discussion of the grim British austerity budget. Second, the view from abroad lacks the tendentiousness of American commentators, who have long ago dug into their partisan bunkers (The New York Times is bad, but The Wall Street Journal is so unrelievedly dogmatic that it makes you cry for the old days of kindly Robert Bartley). The high point was Wednesday, when Simon Schama and Martin Wolf weighed in. You could feel the cool breezes of reason stirring again. Historian Schama offered the overview, making the argument that historians (like, well, Schama) judge presidents differently from grubby politicians or voters, which is no great scholarly conclusion, though he did get off a few good lines.
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