Conversing with Bill Moyers on the JOURNAL this week, media experts Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Brooke Gladstone discussed the language and narratives that have shaped and dominated the 2008 campaign, including the economic bailout legislation and this week’s vice presidential debate.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson suggested that the candidates’ discourse has been ignoring key issues that will face the next administration:

“We’ve now had two debates in which candidates have been asked a significant question... that in changed financial circumstances, with an unprecedented deficit and debt, with the public deficit foreign-held, now about to increase over the huge level that it’s already at, these four candidates – two presidential, two vice presidential – don’t have the courage to tell us that if elected, they will change their spending and taxing plans.”

What do you think?

This is the last weekend to register to vote in many states.

Are you registered? Do you know where to vote? A few non-partisan institutions are working hard to make sure every potential voter can navigate the voting laws of their state.

866ourvote.com is a project of the non-partisan Election Protection coalition. Their Web site has a state by state guide to voting laws, as well as guides for specific communities such as college students or people who have recently lost their homes in the mortgage crisis. They also operate a hot-line for voters who show up at the polls to find their names removed from the voter list: 1-866-OUR-VOTE.

Take a few minutes to go there now, familiarize yourself with your state's
voting laws, and register. And, remind your friends and family of the upcoming deadlines.

Below is an article by JOURNAL senior writer Michael Winship. We welcome your comments below.

Franklin Roosevelt, A Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes to You
By Michael Winship

We thirst for leadership, vision, someone who can speak to us in a way that refuses to avert its eyes from the crisis but shines a light of truth upon the problem, then offers hope and possible solutions.

If this is indeed an economic 9/11, as some have suggested, we need that voice now. Right now. And so far it has yet to be heard. Not from McCain, or Obama, or President Bush.
After September 11, 2001, the President stood on a pile of debris with a megaphone and said that the whole world could hear the rescue workers and shared their grief. Soon, words of sorrow degenerated into bumper sticker rhetoric: Axis of Evil, Wanted Dead or Alive, Mission Accomplished. Nor, at a time when people were ready to do whatever needed to be done, was there a call for national sacrifice. Instead, the President invoked not poets or statesman past but variations on a tee-shirt slogan: when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.

Over the last two weeks, he has been seen infrequently and when he has spoken his words have rung false. This Harvard MBA speaks Economics as though he were phonetically reading a foreign language.

In his conversation with Bill Moyers on this week’s JOURNAL, scholar and former army colonel Andrew Bacevich discussed his vision of what has gone wrong with American government and policy over the last several decades.

“The Congress, especially with regard to matters related to national security policy, has thrust power and authority to the executive branch. We have created an imperial presidency. The Congress no longer is able to articulate a vision of what is the common good. The Congress exists primarily to ensure the reelection of members of Congress... As the Congress has moved to the margins, as the President has moved to the center of our politics, the presidency itself has come to be less effective...

Because of this preoccupation, this fascination with the presidency, the President has become what we have instead of genuine politics, instead of genuine democracy... We look to the next President to fix things and, of course, that lifts all responsibility from me to fix things. So one of the real problems with the imperial presidency is that it has hollowed out our politics and, in many respects, has made our democracy a false one. We’re going through the motions of a democratic political system, but the fabric of democracy really has worn very thin.”

What do you think?

Bacevich talks about the legislative and executive branches. How does the judicial branch relate to his discussion?

Below is an article by JOURNAL senior writer Michael Winship. We welcome your comments below.

Andrew Bacevich, America and the World
By Michael Winship

In a letter written in 1648, the Swedish statesman, Axel Oxenstierna, chancellor to both King Gustavus Adolphus and Queen Christina, counseled, “Know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed.”

The fighting between Russia and the former Soviet republic of Georgia is an unnerving reminder of that, and of how quickly the balance of global power can be tilted from unexpected directions with barely a warning.

Some hawks and neo-cons called for NATO intervention or even suggested we send in Stinger missiles or the 82nd Airborne as a peacekeeping force. President Bush warned, “Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century.”

Whether or not you agree with that dire diagnosis, you may have some questions for the Presidential candidates that have not penetrated coverage of the horse race.

What questions would you ask of the Presidential candidates?

Please respond below or email your questions to moyersblog [at] thirteen.org

NEW YORK TIMES financial columnists Floyd Norris and Gretchen Morgenson discussed what bailouts entail. Morgenson said:

“The ugly thing about this is privatizing gains and socializing losses. So when things are going well, the managements make out, the shareholders make out, the counterparties are fine. All the private sector people do well. But when something goes wrong, when decisions are made that turn out to be bad decisions, the U.S. taxpayer has to take on the problem. And there’s something very wrong about that.”

Economic and political critic Kevin Phillips argued that both parties bear responsibility for the economic crisis and are unlikely to shake up the status quo.

“It’s been a bipartisan phenomenon. You can go back to the 1980s and say Reagan and George Bush, Sr. got a bubble started. Clinton got in and got an even bigger bubble going. And then George W. Bush with the biggest bubble of all. But it’s not that the Clintonites didn’t play. They did... The Democrats think it's going to be another 1933, they get in there [and] they can do all the New Deal stuff. My feeling is that they're coming in halfway and they're going to have to make hard decisions that are going to eat the Democratic coalition like a bologna sandwich.”

Some commentators on the left see a silver lining in getting the government involved in various companies. Welcoming what he terms “massive socialism,” Matthew Yglesias of THINK PROGRESS wrote:

“Isn’t there an enormous progressive opportunity here? ... If the government directly controls major financial institutions, that would give the new administration extraordinary leverage over the national economy... I think it creates a real opportunity for ‘socially conscious insurance underwriting’ or whatever you care to call it.”

But INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY contends that government social policy has been a major contributor to the economic mess:

“It was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans... Tough new regulations forced lenders into high-risk areas where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against making. It was either that or face stiff government penalties.”

What do you think?

During the last five years of his tenure as CEO of now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld’s total take was $354 million. John Thain, the current chairman of Merrill Lynch, taken over this week by Bank of America, has been on the job for just nine months. He pocketed a $15 million signing bonus. His predecessor, Stan O’Neal, retired with a package valued at $161 million, after the company reported an eight billion dollar loss in a single quarter. And remember Bear Stearns Chairman James Cayne? After the company collapsed earlier this year and was up for sale at bargain basement prices, he sold his stake for more than $60 million.

Daniel Mudd and Richard Syron, the former heads of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – aka the gods who failed – are fighting to keep severance packages of close to $24 million combined – on top of the millions in salary each earned last year while slaughtering the golden calf. As it is written in the Gospel According to Me, when the going gets tough, the tough get going.

Please submit your questions below.

Below is an article by JOURNAL senior writer Michael Winship. We welcome your comments below.

Lipstick On Polar Bears
By Michael Winship

Where would politicians be without the Titanic? As metaphors go, it’s far more majestic than putting lipstick on pigs or pit bulls.

Farmyard bacon and junkyard dogs may come and go but in the world of political rhetoric the Titanic sails on. The most famous shipwreck in modern history is the mother of all metaphors. Just last week, at a rally in Tampa, Florida, Hillary Clinton declared, “Anybody who believes that the Republicans, whoever they are, can fix the mess they created probably believes that the iceberg could have saved the Titanic.”

Please note that the views and opinions expressed by the reporters are not necessarily the views and opinions held by Bill Moyers or BILL MOYERS JOURNAL.

“A man came in here [and] dehumanized us. Members of our church were not human to him. Where did he get that? Where did he get that sense that we’re not human? ... When you hear in talk radio that liberals are evil, that they are traitors, that they are godless, that they are on the side of the terrorists – that’s hate language.”

With Americans’ interest in – and feelings about – the Presidential election reaching a fever pitch, commentators have been parsing the nation’s political discourse to analyze how Americans view one another.

ATLANTIC MONTHLY editor Clive Crook wrote in a recent column that many liberals themselves have a basic disrespect for those with whom they disagree:

“[Democrats’] concern is real and admirable. The trouble is, they lack respect for the objects of their solicitude. Their sympathy comes mixed with disdain, and even contempt. Democrats regard their policies as self-evidently in the interests of the US working and middle classes. Yet those wide segments of US society keep helping to elect Republican presidents. How is one to account for this? Are those people idiots? Frankly, yes – or so many liberals are driven to conclude. Either that or bigots, clinging to guns, God, and white supremacy; or else pathetic dupes, ever at the disposal of Republican strategists... Voters in small towns and suburbs, forever mocked and condescended to by metropolitan liberals, are attuned to this disdain. Every four years, many take their revenge.”

What do you think?

“This [election coverage] isn’t about relative importance. This is about celebrity. This is about putting your finger in the air and following the public mood. Is it news? No. Is it an audience generator? Yes.”

We invite you to discuss in the space below.