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Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen is simply wrong about “race-baiting” and the 2006 senatorial race between Harold Ford and Bob Corker:

In a meeting with Politico reporters, Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen referred to a commercial aired against then-Rep. Harold Ford Jr. (D-Tenn.) in his unsuccessful bid for the Senate in 2006 as an example of the kind of advertising that could backfire against McCain, the Arizona senator and presumptive GOP presidential nominee.

The ad against Ford, produced by the Republican National Committee on behalf of Republican Bob Corker’s campaign, showed a white actress saying she had met Ford at the Playboy mansion and ended with her saying, “Harold, call me.”

“The reality of the ad, which I think ought to be a lesson for McCain right now, is that ad helped Harold Ford, absolutely,” Bredesen said.

To start with, the “bimbo” allusion wasn’t racist.  The Democrat politician with the greatest “bimbo” problem is Bill Clinton, and his performance during his wife’s campaign has put to rest the idea that he was “America’s first black president.”

Beyond that, as I noted at the time, some of the reasons for Bob Corker’s win were as follows:

• Corker’s general election campaign started out as a fiasco, with poor ads and an unfocused effort. Corker had the wisdom to dump his campaign people and get people in who knew what they were doing and let them run his campaign properly. His ads improved along with everything else, including his poll numbers. His ability to change course for victory needs to be noted in the White House.
• Corker did hammer at Ford’s voting record. The image that this campaign was strictly a series of negative personal attacks doesn’t tell the whole story. Corker had the advantage in that he could run against an opponent with ten years of votes in the House (when he bothered to show up, which he frequently didn’t) while Corker had been in executive positions, both in government and business. Ford’s voting record was atypically liberal for the state and Corker made the most of that.
• Ford’s attempts to portray himself as an “ordinary Tennessean” couldn’t withstand the hammering of a competitive campaign. As Bob Novak hilariously pointed out, every time Ford mentioned the Lord he lost 1,000 votes. That’s part of Ford’s record problem. We took issue with that ourselves during the campaign.
• Ford’s greatest gaffe was what I call the “parking lot debate” on 20 October when he crashed a Corker press conference in Memphis. That did not sit well with people here, especially independents. It was the beginning of his downward slide to defeat.

Bredesen has done a service for the Republicans because the analogy between the Ford-Corker and Obama-McCain races is a strong one.  (Thanks, Phil for reminding us!)  Ford was attempting to portray himself as a “new” type of candidate who just happens to be black, just as Obama is.  And the “parking lot” debate is very instructive: it was the act of a very overconfident Ford, who offended many people.  Someone as snobbish as Obama, who in his own spin is running for “Dominus et Deus” rather than President, could easily pull one or more mistakes like it.

McCain’s people could take some lessons from this.  Bob Corker is the only Republican freshman senator in the congress now fading fast, and there’s a reason for that.

Lance Wiggs has hit up on yet another twist in the debt crisis:

It turns out that because of the mortgages being sold and sliced and sold, the ownership of the original mortgage is often in doubt. It took Mamie Ruth Palmer in Atlanta, Georgia to bust this one open, in a court case that has just ended a six year saga.

Her bank tried to foreclose on her, but couldn’t prove that they actually owned the mortgage. The bank ended up in the humiliating situation of losing on pretty much all fronts:

Last month she received a settlement from the Bank of New York, the trustee for a vast pool of mortgages that included hers. Under the terms of the deal, the bank reduced Ms. Palmer’s loan balance to $59,000 from about $100,000 and has agreed to accept the proceeds of a reverse mortgage in full satisfaction of her obligation.

The practice of reselling mortgages is perhaps the most insidious part of this debt crisis, because, when the dominoes started to fall, no one knew where they would end up because of the byzantine resale of debt.  But few anticipated that injury would be added to insult for the lenders when the ownership of the debt came into question.

The Politico’s piece on the attempt–and the risk–of John McCain’s campaign to paint Barack Obama as “unpatriotic” needs a little clarification.

I’ve taken heat for demonstrating that Obama’s relationship with the U.S. is not in sync with what many Americans regard as “patriotic.”  But that begs the obvious question: what is patriotism?

I’ve noted before that this country was founded on an ideal, not an ethnic identity or a prince/subject relationship.  Patriotism as most commonly understood is probably best (if a little overblown) expressed by Jack Kennedy in his “ask not what your country can do for you/ask what you can do for your country” challenge he gave at his inaugural.  We give of ourselves selflessly for our country which in turn gives us the chance to succeed in an atmosphere (and hopefully a legal environment) of freedom and opportunity.

It’s tempting–and it’s John McCain’s challenge to make it stick–to put Barack Obama, with his exotic background and elitist snob demeanour, in isolation.  But Obama’s liberalism is of a piece with an extended attempt to redefine Americans’ relationship with their country, and by extension what patriotism means.

For liberals, loyalty to country centres on government.  Ideally they would like to turn this country into another Europe.  But the U.S. lacks the ethnic homogeniety to bond a nationalist state together such as the Europeans have done, and to undermine things further the left has done more than its share to riddle our national life with identity politics, turning us into a land of racists, sexists and homophobes.  (That almost backfired on them with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but I digress…)

So we must turn to a social contract approach: our government provides us with a battery of social services (education, health care, employment or the dole) and we in turn respond by putting up with any and all of the restrictions our government cares to throw at us and the occasional demand for corvée such as national service (yes, that’s coming with these people, too.)

There are two related problems with this.

The first is that to change a successful formula such as the one we have had in this country is risky.  There’s no guarantee that the U.S. would make a graceful change to a European style social contract, and I’m inclined to think that it wouldn’t.

The second is much simpler to grasp: we are too far in the hole to afford such an experiment.  Like it or not, we are a debtor nation, and the receding of dollar hegemony only will make that worse.  We need the economic growth that a relatively unfettered economy can bring to enable us to meet our obligations.  Larding our system with a new, expensive social contract will hinder our way out of debt, producing a perpetually sluggish economy with reduced living standards and a larger foreign domination of our national life.   It will ultimately defeat its own purpose.

And, if you think that foreign domination is what we “provincial” Americans need, just ask any liberal Episcopalian prelate about what they think of the Africans moving in on their turf.  You can’t always choose your new foreign masters!