On Tuesday, Senate Democrats will decide the turncoat Joe Lieberman's fate as the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. But whether Lieberman retains his chairmanship or even his place in the Democratic caucus, President-elect Barack Obama will apparently play little to no role. It's just another stark contrast with George W. Bush, whose campaign of retribution against Jim Jeffords in 2001 drove the Vermont Senator out of the Republican Party.

That some of Joe Lieberman's former colleagues are turning up the heat is clear. After the milquetoast Senators Evan Bayh and Amy Klobuchar called for Lieberman merely to apologize for his treachery, a growing chorus of voices is now calling for payback. Vermont's delegation of Pat Leahy and Bernie Sanders insisted Lieberman must face real consequences for carrying John McCain's water. And on the eve of Tuesday's secret vote by Democrats on chairman Lieberman's fate, Byron Dorgan (D-ND) simply deemed the Connecticut Quisling's support for McCain and Republican Senate candidates unacceptable.

But one voice counseling restraint is that of Barack Obama. The man most impacted by Joe Lieberman's scurrilous attacks and scorched earth campaigning has announced he does not "hold any grudges."

To be sure, no one could fault Obama for seeking vengeance against the supposed independent Senator from the Nutmeg State. After all, Obama campaigned for Lieberman (at the Lieberman team's request) during his bitter reelection battle against Ned Lamont in the 2006 Democratic primary:

"I am absolutely certain Connecticut is going to have the good sense to send Joe Lieberman back to the U.S. Senate so he can continue to serve on our behalf."

Lieberman repaid Obama's support for him in 2006 by stabbing him in the back in 2008. Luckily for Joe Lieberman, Barack Obama is not George W. Bush.

When Vermont Republican Jim Jeffords bucked President Bush over his planned $1.6 trillion tax cut for the wealthy in 2001, Bush retaliated with the same vicious "politics of payback" that came to define his tenure in the White House. As I noted in 2004:

An early indication of the vindictiveness of this administration came with the saga of Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords' defection from the GOP in 2001. This is a tale of double-retribution. First, Jeffords refused to back the Bush tax cut plan in 2001. As The New Republic reported in June 2001, the White House responded by gutting special education programs supported by Jeffords and by threatening the Northeast Interstate Dairy Compact critical to the Vermont milk industry. To add insult to injury, the Bush team took the unprecedented step of not inviting Jeffords to a White House event honoring a teacher from Vermont. They even denied Jeffords' office White House tour passes for his constituents. His departure from the GOP seemed understandable then and now; his one-time colleagues of course are making his tenure as an independent a lonely one.

Like General Eric Shinseki, counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, Medicare actuary Richard Foster and many more, Senator Jeffords paid the price for crossing George W. Bush and his Republican allies. When Jeffords in May 2001 declared himself an independent and temporarily turned control of the Senate over to the Democrats, Trent Lott (R-MS) called it "a coup of one" and groused, "There is only one person to blame for all this, and that's Jim Jeffords." Ironically, Joe Lieberman responded to Jeffords' joining the Democratic caucus by announcing:

"This is historic. It gives us the opportunity to set the agenda."

Ultimately, Jeffords was shunned by his Republican brethren and was even booted from the Singing Senators, a group of GOP colleagues which ironically included Idaho's Larry Craig. Ostracized and isolated by his former friends, Jeffords retired from the Senate in 2007.

As for Joe Lieberman, Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he would welcome him with open arms. After Lieberman's disgusting, cowardly betrayal of the Democratic Party, they can have him. Some principles are more important than a potential filibuster-proof majority on paper.

As for Barack Obama, he's apparently content to stay out of the imbroglio over Lieberman's fate. After all, the President-elect has bigger issues to worry about than expending time - and political capital - on the Benedict Arnold from Connecticut. Besides, payback just isn't his style. Like most Americans now, he's probably asked himself, "What would Dubya Do?" and decided on the reverse.

Unsurprisingly, it took less than 24 hours for the conservative chattering classes to blame the Bush recession on President-elect Barack Obama. The usual suspects, including Rush Limbaugh, Fred Barnes and Dick Morris, pinned two days of steep stock market declines on Obama's election. Of course, the recent bloodbath on Wall Street has nothing to do with Obama and everything to do with what John McCain deemed "the fundamentals of our economy" being weak. And as history shows time and again, the American economy and stock market almost always do better under Democratic presidents.

That the economy under Bush's guidance is in dire straits is undeniable. After shedding 1.2 million jobs this year, unemployment jumped to 6.5%, the highest level in 14 years. The number of Americans receiving long-term jobless benefits catapulted to a 25 year high while U.S. manufacturing output plummeted to a 26 year low. Home foreclosures skyrocketed by 71% in the third quarter. Devastated by the credit crunch, the American auto industry teeters on the brink of collapse; GM lost $2.5 billion last quarter and could run out of cash next year. In that same quarter, U.S. GDP slumped by 0.3%. It's no wonder that consumer confidence spiraled to its lowest level on record.

In the midst of the meltdown of the U.S. financial system and the dramatic downturn of the American economy, the increasing volatility - and steep losses - on Wall Street should come as no surprise. As Meg Browne, a currency strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman, put it, "The market already knows the economy is pretty sick."

But to hear the right-wing's water carriers tell it, it's all Barack Obama's fault.

Following the drop-off on Wall Street the past two days, the conservative commentariat placed the blame on the new President who has yet to assume office. Echoing CNBC's Larry Kudlow, Dick Morris claimed the markets will "continue to tank...not just because he's a radical, not just because he's a Democrat, but because he's going to raise the capital gains tax. While Fox News' Gretchen Carlson announced, "there's a lot of feeling in the market not reacting very well to the election of Barack Obama," Fred Barnes proclaimed, "There is great uncertainty out there about [Obama's] policies." And on Thursday, the always execrable Rush Limbaugh laid it all at Obama's feet:

"The Obama recession is in full swing, ladies and gentlemen. Stocks are dying, which is a precursor of things to come. This is an Obama recession. Might turn into a depression. He hasn't done anything yet but his ideas are killing the economy. His ideas are killing Wall Street...

...The market's down today because of the jobless numbers. That's how the Drive-Bys see it. Uhhhhh, we have the largest market plunge after an election in history. Thank you, man-child Barack Obama."

Leaving aside for the moment the obvious fact that Barack Obama is not yet in the White House, the conservative hate machine ignores two inconvenient truths. First, of course, the economic calamity that is the Bush recession is well underway. Second is the inescapable historical record which reveals that the economy and the stock market do better under Democrats.

To highlight this point, the New York Times in October asked readers to imagine having put their money where its mouth is. Contrary to Republican mythology, Americans fare better in the market - much, much better - under Democratic administrations:

As of Friday, a $10,000 investment in the S.& P. stock market index would have grown to $11,733 if invested under Republican presidents only, although that would be $51,211 if we exclude Herbert Hoover's presidency during the Great Depression. Invested under Democratic presidents only, $10,000 would have grown to $300,671 at a compound rate of 8.9 percent over nearly 40 years.

(For the eye-popping chart of the S&P's performance under each of the presidents from Hoover through Bush 43, visit here.)

As the broader record shows, the best path to prosperity is to elect Democratic presidents.

The superior performance of Democratic presidents covers virtually the entire spectrum of economic indicators. As Elliott Parker of the University of Nevada, Reno detailed in a 2006 paper, since 1949 Democratic administrations have done better than Republican ones when it comes to unemployment (5.2% to 6.0%), job creation (-.0.4% decrease in unemployment, compared to 0.3% increase), GDP growth rate (4.2% to 2.9%), and even corporate profits as a share of GDP. And to be sure, he found the Dow benefits from Democrats in the White House.

There's no shortage of studies to show that stock market returns are higher under Democratic leadership. (As it turns out, Wall Street's performance is also better when Democrats control Congress.) In 2000, Pedro Santa-Clara and Rossen Valkanov of UCLA's Anderson School of Business concluded that "that the average excess return in the stock market is higher under Democratic than Republican presidents - a difference of 9 percent per year for the value-weighted portfolio and 16 percent for the equal-weighted portfolio." As the New York Times noted of UCLA study in 2003:

"It's not even close. The stock market does far better under Democrats...

...Professors Santa-Clara and Valkanov look at the excess market return - the difference between a broad index of stock prices (basically the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index) and the three-month Treasury bill rate - between 1927 and 1998. The excess return measures how attractive stock investments are compared with completely safe investments like short-term T-bills.

Using this measure, they find that during those 72 years the stock market returned about 11 percent more a year under Democratic presidents and 2 percent more under Republicans - a striking difference."

In 2002, Slate similarly concluded that "Democrats, it turns out, are much better for the stock market than Republicans":

Slate ran the numbers and found that since 1900, Democratic presidents have produced a 12.3 percent annual total return on the S&P 500, but Republicans only an 8 percent return. In 2000, the Stock Trader's Almanac, which slices and dices Wall Street performance figures like baseball stats, came up with nearly the same numbers (13.4 percent versus 8.1 percent) by measuring Dow price appreciation. (Most of the 20th century's bear markets, incidentally, have been Republican bear markets: the Crash of '29, the early '70s oil shock, the '87 correction, and the current stall occurred under GOP presidents.)

According to almanac editor Jeffrey Hirsch, the presidential party figures are among the most significant he's found. If the stock market were random, we'd expect such a result only one-quarter of the time. "I don't know why people are convinced Republicans are good for the stock market," Hirsch says.

Why? Because the Republican amen corner of Kudlow, Barnes, Limbaugh et al continue - with great success - to perpetuate the myth that the regulation-free policies of the GOP that so benefit them personally somehow help the American people overall. Of course, when those policies invariably fail, Americans become (in Phil Gramm's words) are merely "a nation of whiners" whose perception of the economic downturn (in John McCain's words) is "psychological."

And so it goes. George W. Bush has bequeathed an economic disaster to Barack Obama. By accepting responsibility as President to fix it, according to the fraudsters of the right, Obama assumes paternity as well.

Mercifully, the American people know better and proved it at the polls. This time, they followed the wise counsel of Harry Truman:

"If you want to live like a Republican, vote Democratic."

Here, then, are five lessons learned from the 2008 election:

Taxation with Representation. During the campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly stated, "if you make $200,000 a year or less, your taxes will go down." Apparently, voters making more than $200,000 were just fine with that; they supported Obama over McCain by 52% to 46%. (In 2004, Americans whose incomes topped $200k backed George W. Bush over John Kerry by 63% to 35%.) As it turned out, both McCain and Obama supporters by similar margins expected to see their taxes go up. At the end of the day, Americans rejected the Republicans' "socialism" slander.

Expanded Democratic Support Among White Voters. As I suggested Monday, the first major African-American nominee of the Democratic Party surpassed the performance of John Kerry, Al Gore and even Bill Clinton among white voters. Barack Obama secured 43% of the white vote, compared to 41% for Kerry, 42% for Gore, and 43% for Bill Clinton in 1996. Obama made substantial gains among white men, losing by16% (57% to 41%) to McCain while Kerry and Gore lost by 25 and 24 points to Bush, respectively. Importantly, the composition of the American electorate is changing dramatically, with white Americans now constituting only 74% of those casting ballots compared to 83% twelve years ago.

Obama Landslide Among Hispanic Voters. In the wake of his primary battles with Hilary Clinton, the chattering classes predicted tough sledding for Barack Obama among the nation's 43 million Hispanic voters. That simply did not come to pass. Obama routed McCain among Latinos by two-to-one (66% to 32%), a margin critical to his wins in former red states like New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada. No doubt, the xenophobic, anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Republican Party produced a blowback that more than erased its 2004 performance (44%) under George W. Bush. So much for Ronald Reagan's admonition that, "Latinos are Republican. They just don't know it yet."

Ditto for Jewish Voters. Among Jewish voters, too, Barack Obama enjoyed support at roughly the same level as Democrats past. Despite the fear-mongering of the McCain campaign and state GOP operatives, Obama dominated among Jews by 78% to 21%. By way of comparison, John Kerry (74% to 25% for Bush) and Al Gore (80% to 17%) scored about the same as Barack Hussein Obama with American Jews. (Unsurprisingly, despite all of Barack Obama's outreach efforts, white evangelicals remained a GOP monolith by a staggering 50 points, little changed from the 57% delta four years ago.)

Obama Wave Among New Voters. As predicted, Barack Obama captured the overwhelming majority of new voters. First-timers, 11% of all voters on Tuesday, supported Obama by 69% to 30%. That was reflected in Obama's dominance among younger voters, where he carried those ages 18 to 24 and 25 to 29 by 34% and 35%, respectively. Overall, however, voters under 30 did not see major gains as percentage of the total electorate. They made up 18% of voters in 2008 compared to 17% in 2004 and 2000.

UPDATE: The New York Times offers an interactive exit poll tool comparing presidential election results from 1980 through 2008.

On this Election Day, the fates of John McCain and Barack Obama are now - finally - in the hands of Americans voters. But their respective destinies may have been determined by speeches each gave years ago. At the 2004 Democratic convention, Barack Obama introduced himself to the American people with a message of national unity and transformational change that has hardly changed since. But in May 2006, John McCain took to the stage of Reverend Jerry Falwell's Liberty University and, in a matter of minutes, erased everything he claimed to stand for.

As Hilary Rosen recently suggested, McCain's cynical rapprochement with Falwell and the religious right was the first in a cascading acts of political opportunism that undermined his supposed maverick image.

In his failed 2000 primary run against George W. Bush, McCain famously branded the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance." During the decisive South Carolina primary, he paid a steep price for it.

So by early 2006, candidate McCain began his journey to what the Daily Show's Jon Stewart termed "crazy base world." In May of that year, McCain delivered the commencement address at Falwell's Liberty University, where the late minister praised his former foe, "the ilk of John McCain is very scarce, very small." Confronted by Tim Russert weeks before as to whether he still viewed Falwell as an agent of intolerance, McCain grudgingly owned up to his flip-flop, "no, I don't."

So it should have come as no surprise that among the topics McCain addressed on May 13, 2006 was tolerance:

"Americans deserve more than tolerance from one another, we deserve each other's respect, whether we think each other right or wrong in our views, as long as our character and our sincerity merit respect, and as long as we share, for all our differences, for all the noisy debates that enliven our politics, a mutual devotion to the sublime idea that this nation was conceived in - that freedom is the inalienable right of mankind, and in accord with the laws of nature and nature's Creator."

As it turned out, the distance from Jerry Falwell to Pastor John Hagee and the Reverend Rod Parsley was a short one. And the walk away from the "respectful campaign" John McCain promised was shorter still.

The contrast with the tone and consistency of Barack Obama could not be more stark. What the Illinois Senate candidate told the Democratic convention in Boston on July 27, 2004 was not only an historic moment in the annals of American political oratory; it was an unchanging statement of his core beliefs:

"Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.

Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America.

There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America...

...We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."

From that moment forward, Barack Obama has been a stalwart, unshakable messenger of national unity. 80,000 people at the Democratic convention in Denver and a viewing audience of millions more heard the same plea for hope, change and unity. Even yesterday in Jacksonville, Barack Obama again asked Americans to follow the better angels of their nature:

"Despite what our opponents may claim, there are no real or fake parts of this country. There is no city or town that is more pro-America than anywhere else - we are one nation, all of us proud, all of us patriots. The men and women who serve on our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America - they have served the United States of America."

Whoever emerges victorious today, it is worth remembering that elections are about choices made not just by voters. The candidates make fateful choices, too. Ultimately, Barack Obama chose to stay true to himself. But John McCain made different a choice. With his unending policy reversals, the selection of Sarah Palin and, above all, that cynical speech to Jerry Falwell's bastions, John McCain sought to appease his party's radical right all in the goal of securing the Republican presidential nomination. So much for putting "country first."

Heading into Election Day, Senator Obama looks likely to outperform his recent Democratic predecessors across a range of policy and demographic measures. An October Rasmussen survey showed that Americans trust Democrats more than Republicans across each of the 10 issues tracked. The party of Obama enjoys double-digit leads on the economy (by 13%), Social Security (12%), health care (20%)and education (by 19 points).

That issue advantage, compounded by John McCain's feeble response to the economic crisis and the GOP's increasingly xenophobic line towards immigrants, is helping fuel Obama's strong performance among critical voting blocks. As I detailed last week, media myths notwithstanding, Barack Obama will approach traditional levels of Democratic support among Jewish voters and outpoll Al Gore and John Kerry among Hispanics. And with his backing among white voters reaching 44% in the final CBS News/New York Times survey, the African-American Obama may surpass the levels achieved by Gore (42%), Kerry (41%) and even Bill Clinton (43%). Four years ago, John Kerry lost among white men by a 25 point margin (62% to 37%); according to a Fox News poll, Obama now trails John McCain by only 5 points among the same group.

But from the moment John McCain secured the Republican nomination, his fall strategy rested on creating a "character gap" between himself and Obama. As in 2000 and 2004, I argued, the Republicans would try to turn the race into a presidential personality contest:

And to win it, they need to manufacture a "character gap" between John McCain and Barack Obama...The data is clear. If the election is about the economy, health care and Iraq, John McCain cannot become the 44th president. Only if the GOP succeeds once again in transforming the race into a media medley about lapel pins, angry ministers and Muslim-sounding middle names can the Republicans hope to maintain their hold on the White House.

Sadly, we've been here before. The 2000 and 2004 exit polls clearly show the Republican Party succeeded both in portraying the presidential contest as being about character and in defining the accepted media narrative for candidates Bush, Gore and Kerry. Eight years ago, 24% of voters claimed being "honest/trustworthy" was the quality that mattered most; among them, George W. Bush trounced Al Gore by 80% to 15%.

In 2004, Bush walloped the supposed flip-flopper John Kerry by 70% to 29% among those claiming honesty was the most important presidential attribute. Among those wanting a "strong leader," Bush swamped Kerry by a staggering 75 points.

In his 2007 book The Big Con, Jonathan Chait described how Republicans consistently win elections despite almost universal disdain for their policies among the American people. In a nutshell, Chait argues that Republicans must convert elections into contests of character because they simply can't win on issues. While their man, be it George W. Bush or John McCain, is the "authentic" guy you'd "like to have a beer with," the GOP drives the media conventional wisdom that paints the likes of Al Gore, John Kerry and now Barack Obama as effete, out-of-touch elitists whose positions change with the wind:

"Media outlets functionally affiliated with the Republican Party have been able to create news that makes its way into the nonpartisan media. It is a kind of machine that manufactures images of character.

The Republicans' seminal insight was that the random process by which small events come to wield great symbolic insight into the character of presidential candidates didn't have to be random. It was possible to prime the pump, in a way." (p.169)

No doubt, John McCain tried to replicate the same trusted formula in 2008. The Republican Convention was a four-day paean to his personal biography and war-time sacrifice. (Both before and after, McCain and his surrogates deployed the POW card to shield him from criticism on everything from his 11 homes to his health care plan). And to be sure, the Republican smear machine was in full swing, branding Obama as disloyal, a socialist, a communist - and worse. With supporters chanting "John McCain, Not Hussein," it's no surprise that 54% of Republicans in Kentucky and a quarter of Texans wrongly believe Barack Obama to be a Muslim.

And yet, it appears that it may not work, not this time. Despite all of the Republicans' efforts to paint Barack Obama as "the other," the final NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed voters see each man sharing their values by virtually identical margins (Obama 57% to 39%; McCain 57% to 38%). McCain has always led Obama on this question in previous NBC/WSJ surveys. As Republican pollster Robert Newhouse put it:

"Obama seems to broken through on the values attribute. For the first time in our polling, a majority of white voters believe Obama has a background and set of values they identify with."

On other personal attributes, Obama enjoys advantages over McCain. An October 23rd CBS poll revealed that voters saw Obama as more honest than McCain (53% to 46%) and view him more favorably (52% to 46%). In all, CBS reported Americans were more comfortable with Obama:

Obama has been more successful in evoking a positive response from voters: Sixty-two percent say they feel personally comfortable with the Illinois senator. Far fewer - 47 percent - feel comfortable with McCain. In fact, a slightly higher percentage - 49 percent - report feeling "uneasy" about the Republican nominee. Thirty-four percent feel uneasy about Obama.

On all of these questions of demography, philosophy and personality, American voters will provide the answers Tuesday. Some, like the unshakably monolithic support of evangelicals for Republican candidates, will come as no surprise. But when it comes to the GOP's perpetual character war against Democratic candidates, on November 4 Barack Obama may well open some eyes.

After two weeks in which his campaign has tried to brand Barack Obama a "socialist" and worse, John McCain took one small step back from the specter of the red menace. Appearing on the Larry King show Wednesday, McCain admitted that his Democratic opponent is no socialist. But as Election Day nears, don't expect John McCain to repeat his 2005 assessment of Obama, "he's centrist."

The Republican smearing of Obama has included comical charges that the man backed by Warren Buffett and Colin Powell is "anti-American" (Rep. Michele Bachman), a "socialist" (Sarah Palin), a "communist" (Senator Mel Martinez) and a "marxist" (Tom Delay). Last night, McCain dropped the "red" label while still regurgitating discredited right-wing talking points:

KING: You don't believe Barack Obama is a socialist do you?

MCCAIN: No, but I do believe that he has been in the far left of American politics and stated time after time that he believes in spreading the wealth around. He has talked about courts that redistribute the wealth. He has a record of voting against tax cuts. And for tax increases.

Of course, John McCain knows better. And in December 2005, McCain said as much.

As the St. Louis Post Dispatch reported, Mr. Straight Talk put Barack Obama squarely in what it deemed the "sensible center":

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. and a frequent maverick within the GOP, said: "He's very impressive, he's thoughtful, he's centrist."

In that same article ("Obama shuns limelight, builds record"), conservative Republican Senators Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Mel Martinez sang Obama's similarly praised Obama. Senator Obama had worked with the arch social conservative Coburn on oversight of FEMA reconstruction in the Katrina-devastated Gulf Coast. Obama also reached across the aisle to work with Martinez and Dick Lugar (R-IN) to secure nuclear materials from the former Soviet Union. Their feedback echoed McCain's plaudits:

Obama's approach has mostly earned him rave reviews - from Republicans and Democrats alike - who say he is an open-minded, deliberative lawmaker.

Coburn called him a "phenomenal young man who will go to great heights," while Martinez said he hasn't seemed "dogmatic" or "ideologically driven" on any issue.

That would be the same Mel Martinez who just 10 days ago likened Obama's policies to those of Castro's Cuba (video here):

"Where I come from, where I was born, they tried that wealth redistribution business. It didn't work so good down there. That's socialism, that's communism, that's not what Americanism is about."

McCain's seeming retreat on Larry King came just one day after he refused to repudiate Martinez' communist smear during an interview with a Miami CBS affiliate:

Q: Florida Senator Mel Martinez talked about Barack Obama's "spread the wealth" policies and he described them as "communism." Is that fair?

MCCAIN: Hmmm, I don't know what label you put on it but clearly it's not the way to economic prosperity.

As it turns out, bastions of capitalism like The Economist and the Financial Times - each of which endorsed Barack Obama for President - have concluded otherwise. Of course, back in 2005, before he was looking up at Obama in the polls, John McCain understood why.

Among the enduring myths of the 2008 election have been the purported struggles of Barack Obama in securing the support of Hispanic and Jewish voters. But as new polls suggest, Obama will not only dominate John McCain among these groups, he may outperform Al Gore and John Kerry as well.

A recent survey from Gallup revealed a 50 point edge for Obama among Jewish voters. Starting from a two-to-one lead in June, Obama now enjoys triple the support of John McCain:

Jewish voters nationwide have grown increasingly comfortable with voting for Barack Obama for president since the Illinois senator secured the Democratic nomination in June. They now favor Obama over John McCain by more than 3 to 1, 74% to 22%.

With those numbers, Senator Obama is earning the backing of Jewish voters at roughly the same levels Democrats have historically enjoyed. In 2000, Al Gore crushed George W. Bush 80% to 17% among Jews; in 2004, John Kerry pummeled Bush by 74% to 25%.

Despite the best efforts of the Republican Party to falsely brand Obama a Muslim, a terrorist, weak on Israel and even the harbinger of a second Holocaust, the Democrat continues to enjoy solid support among one his party's most faithful constituencies. And while John McCain's dutiful Joe Lieberman has had little impact with Jewish voters, his extremist running mate Sarah Palin apparently has succeeded in scaring them away. (As Gallup noted, the economic crisis has had the same effect among Jewish voters as everyone else - driving support to Obama.)

So, too, with the Hispanic electorate. The xenophobic rhetoric of the GOP and John McCain's serial flip-flops on immigration reform are turning the Hispanic vote into a blue wave for Barack Obama.

Many commentators saw Obama's struggles among Latinos during the primary campaign against Hillary Clinton as a window of opportunity for John McCain. As the data show, that simply has not come to pass.

In a poll released on October 21st, Gallup showed Obama enjoying a 62% to 30% margin among the nation's 43 million Hispanic voters. Among Catholic Hispanics, the delta grows to 39%. Those numbers are consistent with a Pew Research study in July, which found a 43 percentage point gap (66-23).

If Obama's standing among Hispanics persists on November 4th, he will beat the Democratic performance over the past two presidential election cycles. Eight years ago, Al Gore topped George Bush among Hispanic voters by 27 points, 62% to 35%. In 2004, Bush narrowed the gap substantially, losing to Kerry by only 53% to 44%. But by the 2006 mid-terms, Republican anti-immgrant hysteria was already costing McCain's party, as Democrats captured 69% of the Hispanic vote. While McCain himself is not a standard bearer of the anti-immigrant message, his association with his Republican Party's hard line position virtually ensures Barack Obama will significantly outpoll John Kerry among Latino voters.

Back in June, MSNBC's Chuck Todd punctured the myth of Barack Obama's supposed Hispanic problem:

It's no longer fair to say that Obama has a problem with Latino voters; McCain does. This was a case of conventional wisdom that was never based on fact, just semi-informed speculation based on primary exit polling and bad stereotypes of Latinos.

What Chuck Todd said then is also now true of Jewish voters. It is John McCain who has a problem.

UPDATE: MSNBC's Todd today concluded "Obama's dominance among Hispanics in the West is proving to be the difference maker in Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico" and that "it's Hispanics that could be putting him over the top on Nov. 4."

In much the same way that night follows day, a desperate John McCain predictably played the "socialist" card against Barack Obama. Ratcheting up his recent scurrilous attacks that Obama's tax cuts for working Americans constitute "welfare," McCain in his Saturday radio address followed running mate Sarah Palin and Ohio Senator George Voinovich in branding Obama a socialist. Sadly for McCain, his thundering diatribe against refundable tax credits makes him a sworn enemy of his hero Ronald Reagan and, as it turns out, himself.

Again ignoring the inconvenient truth that virtually all American workers pay Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, McCain went on the warpath against Obama's plan that would offer tax relief to 95% of taxpayers:

"You might ask: How do you cut income taxes for 95 percent of Americans, when more than 40 percent pay no income taxes right now? How do you reduce the number zero?

Well, that's the key to Barack Obama's whole plan: Since you can't reduce taxes on those who pay zero, the government will write them all checks called a tax credit. And the Treasury will cover those checks by taxing other people, including a lot of folks just like Joe.

In other words, Barack Obama's tax plan would convert the IRS into a giant welfare agency, redistributing massive amounts of wealth at the direction of politicians in Washington. I suppose when you've voted against lowering taxes 94 times, as Senator Obama has done, a new definition of the term "tax credit" comes in handy.

At least in Europe, the Socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives."

Unfortunately for McCain, there are a least three fatal flaws in his red-baiting scheme.

On Wednesday, the New York Times performed an election year public service with an analysis that was part history lesson and part thought exercise. Taking the example of the S&P 500 going back to Herbert Hoover, the Times rightly concluded that the Democratic Party "has been better for American pocketbooks and capitalism as a whole." But the Democrats' proven track record isn't limited to the S&P index. As history has proven time and again, Wall Street and the economy overall simply do better under Democratic presidents.

To make its case, the New York Times asked readers to imagine having put their money where its mouth is. Contrary to Republican mythology, Americans fare better - much, much better - under Democratic administrations:

As of Friday, a $10,000 investment in the S.& P. stock market index would have grown to $11,733 if invested under Republican presidents only, although that would be $51,211 if we exclude Herbert Hoover's presidency during the Great Depression. Invested under Democratic presidents only, $10,000 would have grown to $300,671 at a compound rate of 8.9 percent over nearly 40 years.

(For the eye-popping chart of the S&P's performance under each of the presidents from Hoover through Bush 43, visit here.)

As the broader record shows, the best path to prosperity is to elect Democratic presidents.

The superior performance of Democratic presidents covers virtually the entire spectrum of economic indicators. As Elliott Parker of the University of Nevada, Reno detailed in a 2006 paper, since 1949 Democratic administrations have done better than Republican ones when it comes to unemployment (5.2% to 6.0%), job creation (-.0.4% decrease in unemployment, compared to 0.3% increase), GDP growth rate (4.2% to 2.9%), and even corporate profits as a share of GDP. And to be sure, he found the Dow benefits from Democrats in the White House.

There's no shortage of studies to show that stock market returns are higher under Democratic leadership. (As it turns out, Wall Street's performance is also better when Democrats control Congress.) In 2000, Pedro Santa-Clara and Rossen Valkanov of UCLA's Anderson School of Business concluded that "that the average excess return in the stock market is higher under Democratic than Republican presidents - a difference of 9 percent per year for the value-weighted portfolio and 16 percent for the equal-weighted portfolio." As the New York Times noted of UCLA study in 2003:

"It's not even close. The stock market does far better under Democrats...

...Professors Santa-Clara and Valkanov look at the excess market return - the difference between a broad index of stock prices (basically the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index) and the three-month Treasury bill rate - between 1927 and 1998. The excess return measures how attractive stock investments are compared with completely safe investments like short-term T-bills.

Using this measure, they find that during those 72 years the stock market returned about 11 percent more a year under Democratic presidents and 2 percent more under Republicans - a striking difference."

In 2002, Slate similarly concluded that "Democrats, it turns out, are much better for the stock market than Republicans":

Slate ran the numbers and found that since 1900, Democratic presidents have produced a 12.3 percent annual total return on the S&P 500, but Republicans only an 8 percent return. In 2000, the Stock Trader's Almanac, which slices and dices Wall Street performance figures like baseball stats, came up with nearly the same numbers (13.4 percent versus 8.1 percent) by measuring Dow price appreciation. (Most of the 20th century's bear markets, incidentally, have been Republican bear markets: the Crash of '29, the early '70s oil shock, the '87 correction, and the current stall occurred under GOP presidents.)

According to almanac editor Jeffrey Hirsch, the presidential party figures are among the most significant he's found. If the stock market were random, we'd expect such a result only one-quarter of the time. "I don't know why people are convinced Republicans are good for the stock market," Hirsch says.

Why? Because Republican water carriers like Larry Kudlow and Donald Luskin continue - with great success - to perpetuate the myth that the regulation-free policies of the GOP that so benefit them personally somehow help the American people overall. (In an example of legendarily bad timing, right-wing water carrier and McCain adviser Luskin took to the pages of the Washington Post the day before the Wall Street implosion to defend Phil Gramm's assessment of the economy, calling America "a nation of exaggerators.")

So when John McCain admitted Sunday that "the economy has hurt us a little bit in the last week or two," he wasn't merely acknowledging voters' worries about his self-proclaimed economic ignorance. McCain was simply confirming what Harry Truman told Americans generations ago:

"If you want to live like a Republican, vote Democratic."

At Warren's Saddleback event with Barack Obama this summer, McCain surprised many by adding Lewis to a troika of trusted advisers featuring the usual suspects General David Petraeus and former Bay CEO Meg Whitman:

WARREN: This first question deals with leadership and the personal life of leadership. First question, who were the three wisest people that you know that you would rely on heavily in an administration?

MCCAIN: [...] I think John Lewis. John Lewis was at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Had his skull fractured. Continues to serve. Continues to have the most optimistic outlook about America. He can teach us all a lot about the meaning of courage and commitment to causes greater than ourself...

Afterwards, Congressman Lewis responded to the news of his previously unknown role as a Republican presidential adviser by noting:

"Senator McCain and I are colleagues in the U.S. Congress, not confidantes. He does not consult me. And I do not consult him."

But on Saturday, Lewis did offer McCain some counsel and a stinging rebuke. In the wake of McCain campaign events in which Barack Obama was threatened and called a "terrorist," an "Arab," and a "traitor," Lewis blasted McCain and his running mate:

"As one who was a victim of violence and hate during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, I am deeply disturbed by the negative tone of the McCain-Palin campaign. Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse.

During another period, in the not too distant past, there was a governor of the state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a presidential candidate. George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.

As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all. They are playing a very dangerous game that disregards the value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy. We can do better. The American people deserve better."

For his part, McCain played the victim and demanded Barack Obama repudiate Lewis' hyperbolic comparison of the McCain-Palin ticket to George Wallace:

"Congressman John Lewis' comments represent a character attack against Governor Sarah Palin and me that is shocking and beyond the pale...I am saddened that John Lewis, a man I've always admired, would make such a brazen and baseless attack on my character and the character of the thousands of hardworking Americans who come to our events to cheer for the kind of reform that will put America on the right track."

In response, the Obama campaign kept the focus squarely where it belonged – on the hatemongering of John McCain and his increasingly desperate supporters. Just hours Obama had signaled his appreciation to McCain for scolding some of his angry GOP backers, his campaign responded:

"Senator Obama does not believe that John McCain or his policy criticism is in any way comparable to George Wallace or his segregationist policies. But John Lewis was right to condemn some of the hateful rhetoric that John McCain himself personally rebuked just last night, as well as the baseless and profoundly irresponsible charges from his own running mate that the Democratic nominee for President of the United States 'pals around with terrorists.' As Barack Obama has said himself, the last thing we need from either party is the kind of angry, divisive rhetoric that tears us apart at a time of crisis when we desperately need to come together."

As for John Lewis, his short but unhappy tenure as a close confidant to John McCain has apparently come to an end. As for McCain, he still has General Petraeus, who this week to McCain's certain dismay acknowledged, "You have to talk to enemies." Meanwhile, on Tuesday Meg Whitman got John McCain's seal of approval as a potential Treasury Secretary, just one day after eBay announced it was slashing 10% of its workforce.

(This piece originally appeared at Crooks and Liars.)

The Obama '08 iPhone application (available for free) brings much of the content and functionality of the Obama web site to the Apple mobile device now used by millions of Americans. Users can access positions on the issues, receive breaking campaign updates, get national and local campaign news, find nearby Obama events and browse video and photos. And as the Los Angeles Times noted, "with the device's global positioning system technology, it will give you directions to the nearest campaign office."

But the real breakthrough for political organizing at the grassroots level is the "Call Friends" feature. In a nutshell, Call Friends turns the iPhone into your own mobile, personal phone bank, letting you call and track the support of the people you know in the states that matter most.

As Stephen Shankland of CNET reported:

The most notable feature "organizes and prioritizes your contacts by key battleground states, making it easy to reach out and make an impact quickly," according to the software.

On my phone, the application ranked contacts in Colorado, Michigan, and New Mexico at the top; at the bottom was a friend whose cell phone has a Texas number, though she actually lives in California.

The Obama '08 iPhone application also automatically calculates Call Stats, tracking not only the status of your personal outreach to each of your own contacts, but showing the totals and leaders nationwide. Importantly, users' privacy and anonymity is protected. Only the total number of calls made is uploaded; no personal data or contacts are uploaded to or stored by the Obama campaign.

The new iPhone application provides another stark contrast between the online approaches of the Obama and McCain campaigns. While Team Obama has offered another innovative new tool to empower bottoms-up organizing, the McCain campaign instead pioneered with gimmickry - and bribery. As the Washington Post mockingly reported in August, the McCain campaign offers its devotees points and prizes for "Astro Turfing," that is, cutting and pasting McCain propaganda into blogs and web sites:

"Spread John McCain's official talking points around the Web -- and you could win valuable prizes!"

While the McCain campaign's sole online achievement has been to drive views of its endless stream of attack ads, the Obama camp has one-upped its rival once again in putting cutting-edge technology to use at the grassroots. As Politico's Ben Smith recently concluded:

"Obama's then goes on to do what McCain's doesn't, which is to provide his supporters this whole infrastructure to organize themselves to do things that are going to help get Obama elected, and McCain's just doesn't do that."

For information and download instructions for the Obama '08 iPhone app, visit here.

As the meltdown on Wall Street continues, American voters would do well to regard John McCain and his Republican Party with suspicion when it comes to the resuscitating the economy. But McCain's acknowledged ignorance on economic issues, happy talk about strong "fundamentals," ties to lobbyists and disturbing involvement in the 1980's savings and loan disaster aren't the only reasons voters should flock to Barack Obama for solutions to the mushrooming financial crisis. As history has proven time and again, Wall Street and the economy overall simply do better under Democratic presidents.

To be sure, the prospect of John McCain at the helm of the American economy is a frightening one. On multiple occasions, McCain deemed the downturn "psychological," while proclaiming as recently as Monday's 500 point drop in the Dow that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong." Even Alan Greenspan, whose book McCain claimed in December 2007 offset that fact that "the issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should," blasted McCain's $3.3 trillion budget-busting tax plan, "I'm not in favor of financing tax cuts with borrowed money."

Then there is the question, in the words of the New York Life ad, of "the company you keep." From campaign chairman Rick Davis and transition chief William Timmons on down, the McCain campaign is dominated by Wall Street lobbyists. John McCain's economic adviser and UBS vice-chairman Phil Gramm (the same Phil Gramm who mocked Americans as a "nation of whiners") this week saw his firm face another $5 billion in write-downs. And by regurgitating virtually the same policy prescriptions as George W. Bush on tax cuts, health care, Social Security privatization, John McCain is offering Americans more of the same snake oil that produced the current economic calamity.

Then there are the eerie parallels between today's market meltdown and the savings and loan implosion of the late 1980's and 1990's. That fiasco of deregulation ultimately cost American taxpayers as much as $300 billion. Some $2.6 billion of that was attributed to the collapse of Lincoln Financial, run by McCain sugar daddy Charles Keating. While John McCain survived the Keating Five scandal (barely), Washington's multi-billion bailouts and cash infusions this week are grim reminders of why McCain can't be trusted to regulate his friends or run the economy.

But there is a much more basic reason to keep John McCain and the Republicans out of the White House. As the record shows, the best path to prosperity is to elect Democratic presidents.

The superior performance of Democratic presidents covers virtually the entire spectrum of economic indicators. As Elliott Parker of the University of Nevada, Reno detailed in a 2006 paper, since 1949 Democratic administrations have done better than Republican ones when it comes to unemployment (5.2% to 6.0%), job creation (-.0.4% decrease in unemployment, compared to 0.3% increase), GDP growth rate (4.2% to 2.9%), and even corporate profits as a share of GDP. And to be sure, he found the Dow benefits from Democrats in the White House.

There's no shortage of studies to show that stock market returns are higher under Democratic leadership. (As it turns out, Wall Street's performance is also better when Democrats control Congress.) In 2000, Pedro Santa-Clara and Rossen Valkanov of UCLA's Anderson School of Business concluded that "that the average excess return in the stock market is higher under Democratic than Republican presidents - a difference of 9 percent per year for the value-weighted portfolio and 16 percent for the equal-weighted portfolio." As the New York Times noted of UCLA study in 2003:

"It's not even close. The stock market does far better under Democrats...

...Professors Santa-Clara and Valkanov look at the excess market return - the difference between a broad index of stock prices (basically the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index) and the three-month Treasury bill rate - between 1927 and 1998. The excess return measures how attractive stock investments are compared with completely safe investments like short-term T-bills.

Using this measure, they find that during those 72 years the stock market returned about 11 percent more a year under Democratic presidents and 2 percent more under Republicans - a striking difference."

In 2002, Slate similarly concluded that "Democrats, it turns out, are much better for the stock market than Republicans":

Slate ran the numbers and found that since 1900, Democratic presidents have produced a 12.3 percent annual total return on the S&P 500, but Republicans only an 8 percent return. In 2000, the Stock Trader's Almanac, which slices and dices Wall Street performance figures like baseball stats, came up with nearly the same numbers (13.4 percent versus 8.1 percent) by measuring Dow price appreciation. (Most of the 20th century's bear markets, incidentally, have been Republican bear markets: the Crash of '29, the early '70s oil shock, the '87 correction, and the current stall occurred under GOP presidents.)

According to almanac editor Jeffrey Hirsch, the presidential party figures are among the most significant he's found. If the stock market were random, we'd expect such a result only one-quarter of the time. "I don't know why people are convinced Republicans are good for the stock market," Hirsch says.

Why? Because Republican water carriers like Larry Kudlow and Donald Luskin continue - with great success - to perpetuate the myth that the regulation-free policies of the GOP that so benefit them personally somehow help the American people overall. (In an example of legendarily bad timing, right-wing water carrier and McCain adviser Luskin took to the pages of the Washington Post Sunday to defend Phil Gramm's assessment of the economy, calling America "a nation of exaggerators.")

So, when John McCain calls for a commission to look into the crisis on Wall Street and decries, "a casino on Wall Street of greedy, corrupt excess," remember that he's describing his friends and political allies. And as the history shows, it's not just John McCain's record on the economy which is pathetic. He has that in common with his Republican predecessors.

As Harry Truman famously said, "if you want to live like a Republican, vote Democratic."

In the run-up to Sarah Palin's speech Wednesday, many across the political spectrum were tempted to compare the Alaska Governor to Bush 41's dubious VP choice of legend, Dan Quayle. But while her admittedly powerful performance in St. Paul last night was surely never matched by Bush the Elder's master of the malapropism, it nevertheless featured its own Quayle moment. Seeking to pad her reed-thin resume as a small town mayor, Sarah Palin compared herself to President Harry Truman. Well, as Lloyd Bentsen might have said, Governor, you're no Harry Truman.

Almost from the beginning of her speech, Palin tried to turn the Truman analogy to her double-benefit. First, of course, Palin played up the mythology of small town, heartland goodness against the "Washington elite" supposedly represented by the media and her Democratic opponents alike. Then came the Palin's suggestion that she is Harry Truman's natural successor, an inexperienced, little known small town pol who suddenly rises to meet the global crises of the day:

My parents are here tonight, and I am so proud to be the daughter of Chuck and Sally Heath. Long ago, a young farmer and habber-dasher from Missouri followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency.

A writer observed: "We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity." I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman.

Sadly for Sarah Palin, any resemblance to Harry Truman ends there.

Harry Truman, after all, had been a judge and a two-term United States Senator from Missouri before becoming vice president. A serial failure as a businessman, Captain Truman was a World War I veteran whose political career was fast-tracked by Tom Pendergast, the fabled boss of the Kansas City political machine. Truman was elected to the Senate in 1934. Before being tapped by Roosevelt to be his running mate in 1944, Truman headed a committee that exposed scandals of military fraud and mismanagement after the outbreak of the Second World War.

Thrust into the presidency following the death of FDR in April 1945, the self-doubting Truman emerged as commander-in-chief on day one. (Surely Sarah Palin did not want to call attention to the 72 year old McCain and the age issue.) Truman saw the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and went forward with the decision to drop the atomic bomb. It was his administration which articulated the Truman doctrine of containment of the Soviet Union and intervened to save South Korea.

At home, Harry Truman would doubtless have been a villain to Sarah Palin and her generation of right-wing Republican ideologues. Truman, after all, integrated the United States military and supported union organizing. While ultimately unsuccessful, Truman called for national health insurance. And during his shocking upset of Thomas Dewey in 1948, "Give 'Em Hell Harry" had a message for the Republican Party:

"I have never deliberately given anybody hell. I just tell the truth [to] the opposition - and they think it's hell."

In her creation myth unveiled last night, Governor Palin tried to appropriate Harry Truman's small town roots to enhance her limited biography and VP potential. But as they say on financial disclosure forms, someone else's past performance is no guarantee of your future results.

Governor Palin, the American people knew Harry Truman. And Governor, you're no Harry Truman.

Monday was a miserable day for the Dow, with the market suffering a 242 point drop. But rather than joining "so-called market analysts" in attributing the sell-off to credit market woes, higher oil prices and a fluctuating dollar, the National Review's resident class warrior Larry Kudlow found a predictable villain. Despite the inescapable history that the stock market does better under Democratic presidents than Republican ones, Kudlow blamed the market steep slide on the opening of the Democratic Convention in Denver.

Unsurprisingly, the reliably Republican Kudlow faithfully regurgitated every GOP talking point in laying the Wall Street's woes at the door of the DNC:

"Are the Denver Dems downing the stock market today? The Dow is off 230 points, starting right from the get-go. So-called market analysts are blaming financials and the credit crunch as they always do. But there’s more.

Obama and Biden gave us plenty of class warfare in their Springfield, Ill., get together on Saturday. Tax the rich. Redistribute income and wealth. Go after all those corporate meanies. Trade protection...

...With the Denver Dems strutting their stuff, this could be a bumpy week for stocks. Did anyone say free-market capitalism is the best path to prosperity?"

Of course, as the record shows, the best path to prosperity is to elect Democratic presidents.

The superior performance of Democratic presidents covers virtually the entire spectrum of economic indicators. As Elliott Parker of the University of Nevada, Reno detailed in a 2006 paper, since 1949 Democratic administrations have done better than Republican ones when it comes to unemployment (5.2% to 6.0%), job creation (-.0.4% decrease in unemployment, compared to 0.3% increase), GDP growth rate (4.2% to 2.9%), and even corporate profits as a share of GDP. And to be sure, he found the Dow benefits from Democrats in the White House.

There's no shortage of studies to show that stock market returns are higher under Democratic leadership. (As it turns out, Wall Street's performance is also better when Democrats control Congress.) In 2000, Pedro Santa-Clara and Rossen Valkanov of UCLA's Anderson School of Business concluded that "that the average excess return in the stock market is higher under Democratic than Republican presidents - a difference of 9 percent per year for the value-weighted portfolio and 16 percent for the equal-weighted portfolio." As the New York Times noted of UCLA study in 2003:

"It's not even close. The stock market does far better under Democrats...

...Professors Santa-Clara and Valkanov look at the excess market return - the difference between a broad index of stock prices (basically the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index) and the three-month Treasury bill rate - between 1927 and 1998. The excess return measures how attractive stock investments are compared with completely safe investments like short-term T-bills.

Using this measure, they find that during those 72 years the stock market returned about 11 percent more a year under Democratic presidents and 2 percent more under Republicans - a striking difference."

In 2002, Slate similarly concluded that "Democrats, it turns out, are much better for the stock market than Republicans":

Slate ran the numbers and found that since 1900, Democratic presidents have produced a 12.3 percent annual total return on the S&P 500, but Republicans only an 8 percent return. In 2000, the Stock Trader's Almanac, which slices and dices Wall Street performance figures like baseball stats, came up with nearly the same numbers (13.4 percent versus 8.1 percent) by measuring Dow price appreciation. (Most of the 20th century's bear markets, incidentally, have been Republican bear markets: the Crash of '29, the early '70s oil shock, the '87 correction, and the current stall occurred under GOP presidents.)

According to almanac editor Jeffrey Hirsch, the presidential party figures are among the most significant he's found. If the stock market were random, we'd expect such a result only one-quarter of the time. "I don't know why people are convinced Republicans are good for the stock market," Hirsch says.

Why? Because Republican water carriers like Larry Kudlow continue - with great success - to perpetuate the myth that the regulation-free policies of the GOP that so benefit them personally somehow help the American people overall.

Back in April, CNBC's Kudlow compared the economic downturn to an enema, declaring, "Recessions are therapeutic." Needless to say, Kudlow's "let them eat cake" pronouncement is not true. Then again, neither is his myth that Republicans are better than Democrats for the stock market.

By the time it was revealed late Friday night, Barack Obama's selection of Joe Biden as his running mate came as no surprise. Even more predictable is the response of Ron Fournier, the AP's Washington Bureau Chief, Bush cheerleader and almost McCain aide, that Biden is the "ultimate insider" who represents a rejection of Barack Obama's own campaign of "change." But as it turns out, once upon a time Joe Biden was himself the Democratic candidate of change and a new generation of leadership.

Back in 1983, then Democratic pollster (and sadly, current Fox News shill) Pat Caddell polled voters about match-ups between a hypothetical younger, new generation Democrat and front-runner Walter Mondale on the one hand and Republican President Ronald Reagan on the other. As Time recounted, the data suggested such a "generational" figure would present a compelling candidate in 1984:

One was dedicated to traditional politics and special interests; the other, young and imaginative, stressed new ideas and called for a new generation of leadership. Caddell professed surprise at how many people chose the Hart-like candidate in his loaded formulation.

And the man Caddell wanted to embody his new generation of leadership was Delaware Senator Joe Biden. But despite Caddell's entreaties, Biden opted to sit out that campaign. And as The Atlantic reported, "Biden's decision not to run in 1984 cleared the way for Hart to use the generational theme."

The rest, as they say, is history. After a surprising second place showing in Iowa, the candidate of "new ideas" and a "new generation of leadership" Gary Hart shocked Walter Mondale in New Hampshire. But for a few thousand votes in Georgia on Super Tuesday and subsequent slip-ups in Illinois, New York and New Jersey, Hart's change campaign might have won the Democratic nomination in San Francisco that July.

As for Biden, he picked up the change baton during his ill-fated 1988 presidential run. As the Atlantic noted, after Hart's implosion over the Donna Rice affair, the generational torch was passed to Biden:

On many issues Biden sounds a lot like Hart, particularly when he criticizes the role of special interests in the Democratic Party. But there is a lot more feeling in Biden's critique. Biden has become something of a contrarian in the party. He goes before labor groups and women's groups and peace groups and Democratic Party groups and says, "I want to say some things to you today and some of it you may not like"...

...Biden aims his pitch at the Baby Boom generation. His appeal, repeated in almost every major speech, is moving and evocative: "The cynics believe that my generation--having reached the conservative age of mortgage payments, pediatricians' bills, and saving for our children's education--are ripe for Republican picking. These experts believe that, like the Democratic Party itself, the less-than-forty-year-old voters are prepared to sell their souls for some security, real or illusory. They have misjudged us. Just because our political heroes were murdered does not mean that the dream does not still live, buried deep within the broken hearts of tens of millions of Americans." At more than one Democratic forum that passage has brought down the house.

Ultimately, of course, Biden's own undisciplined 1988 campaign foundered over the Kinnock flap, in which Biden delivered a speech featuring unattributed passages from the British Labor Party leader.

Despite the failures of its past messengers, the message of change is alive and well in the Democratic Party. While an embittered, contrarian Pat Caddell sold his soul to corporate masters from Coke to Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp, Gary Hart was an early and enthusiastic endorser of Barack Obama. As for Joe Biden, he isn't merely now a more seasoned complement to Obama's insurgent candidacy. Joe Biden was, and is, a kindred spirit.

Rule #1 of the vice presidential selection process is akin to the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm. And with rumors swirling that Barack Obama is seriously considering first-term Virginia Governor Tim Kaine as his #2, the Democratic nominee risks breaking rule #1.

Which isn't to say that Kaine doesn't score well on some of the half-dozen metrics (such as geography, chemistry, theme, balance, experience and party solidarity) often used to assess vice presidential aspirants.

Kaine, after all, is part of the statewide Democratic wave including Mark Warner and Jim Webb which could help carry his state for Obama. And to be sure, the close relationship between Obama and Kaine - and their families - is an asset on the campaign trail and beyond. Thematically, the 50-year old Kaine like Obama is a new face in national Democratic politics and could bolster Obama's campaign of change ushered in by a new generation of leadership. Obama-Kaine '08 harkens back to the energy and relative youth of Clinton-Gore '92.

But those aren't the primary challenges Obama faces in the veepstakes. In a campaign in which John McCain and the Republican attack machine will paint Barack Obama as an inexperienced neophyte on national security issues, Tim Kaine would be a liability. A man without either military experience or involvement in defense and foreign policy at the national level, the untested Kaine would only magnify the perception Obama must battle until election day.

And then there's matter of abortion and the role of protecting reproductive rights in solidifying Obama's support among former Hillary Clinton backers. A devout Catholic (he served as a missionary in the Honduras), Kaine is personally opposed to abortion and backed so-called partial birth abortion legislation. But while his policy of supporting existing laws on abortion, as with the death penalty, has placated many Democrats, it also creates confusion.

Today, for example, the University of Virginia's Larry Sabato deemed Kaine "is pro-choice in effect while projecting a pro-life image." But last month, University of Richmond political scientist Dan Palazzolo concluded, "he's pro-life, basically." It's no wonder Kaine gets little credit on the issue from some Catholic groups.

The danger for Obama is that Kaine would get even less credit from Hillary's supporters. While the polling data show Obama has come a long way in consolidating his standing among women voters in general and Clinton's backers in particular, John McCain's anti-choice views have played a key role. Bypassing Hillary Clinton as his running mate for Kaine could reopen that wound.

None of this is to suggest that Governor Tim Kaine isn't a solid candidate and a rising star in the Democratic Party. He is both of those things. But Kaine is not the right fit for what Barack Obama and the Democratic Party need now in their vice presidential choice.

For the next few days, I'll be blogging intermittently from the Netroots Nation (formerly YearlyKos) conference in Austin, Texas. While most eyes will be on the headliners like Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Lawrence Lessig, Wesley Clarke and Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, there are