A question has come across my inbox today, and as I am wont to do I began to answer my email friend (who I’ve known, by the way, since we both posted on the John Edwards blog). More or less 100 words into the reply it occurred to me that this was a question best answered in front of a larger audience.

The question? My friend is having trouble committing to Obama.

Why? I’m paraphrasing, but it would be fair to say that the sudden emergence of Obama’s "handlers" was a factor...and although it’s not in the note, I suspect the fact that Obama has "tacked to the center" recently on various issues is part of the problem as well.

It’s a great question...and in an effort to provide a great answer I’m going to offer a few words of my own—and then I thought we might reach back a bit into history and see if there might be something we can learn.

Having come to the metaphorical tee and taken the first shot, let’s head down the fairway and see where that ball might be...and where we can get it to go.

    In The 1920s Credit Bubble, I explained how a credit binge gave rise to serial bubbles in housing, durable consumer goods, and the infamous stock bubble of the 1920s.  Last week in The Panic of 2008: a Turning Point I gave a big picture overview of how our current credit crunch is unfolding.  At that time I pointed out that there were some important differences between our credit crunch, and the collapse of the 1920s credit bubble into the Great Depression.

   So a chronological examination of how the apparently mild if abrupt downturn that began in late 1929 transformed into a much more serious downturn that ultimately snowballed into the Great Depression will tell us what events to watch for.  That is the goal of this diary:  to peer into our near future by examining how events unfolded during the year following the stock market crash, 1930.

On July 19, 1870 France declared war on Prussia, starting the Franco-Prussian War.

Louis Napoleon evidently had his own Neo-Conservatives who guaranteed that the French army would Can-Can its way to Berlin.

In fact, the Emperor decided to lead the chorus line himself. Unfortunately, the charming bumbler had delusions of competence; he inherited the name Bonaparte but none of his uncle's military genius. His army of 120.000 soldiers never got further than Sedan, where the entire force was captured by the Germans. And this French army was supposed to be rescuing another French army that was trapped at Metz.

Plato talked about the Noble Lie that he said that rulers must maintain in order to keep social cohesion. In other words, in order for a group of people to build an identity as a nation, they must center themselves around a common narrative, even if it involves a noble lie. And these sorts of noble lies have been told throughout history. The church told the noble lie of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus in order to create conformity.

The narrative of the founding of America has been a noble lie -- the illusion that our leaders had freedom's best interests at heart. But what the Bush administration has done over the last eight years has been no different than what our country has been doing for the last 200 -- torturing, wiretapping, and committing war crimes in the name of freedom.

In any discussion about who is left and what positions do left-leaning people adopt can not be meaningful without setting in the context of American political culture.

Those who are coming to this story today have jumped into the middle of quite a tale. I put myself in a tough position last time by promising to link a British "garden of lust", Benjamin Franklin, and 18th Century bloggers into a narrative that concludes with the nascent United States of America and its shiny new Fourth Amendment.

So far, amazingly enough, I’m pulling it off.
If you need to catch up, here’s what’s been going on:

When last we met...it was in a world of scandal and intrigue; with King George III and the Earl of Bute (and of course, their assorted minions) very upset with John Entick, author, and John Wilkes, author and world-class raconteur (and drinking buddy to Franklin), because they had the temerity to...well, blog.

The Earl of Bute had taken so much abuse from the Johns that he had been forced to resign from his position as Prime Minister...leaving the minions under his control, many said, only now from behind the scenes.

Something needed to be done...and when you have minions, you put them to use.

In 1930, my grandfather walked into a bank in Western Massachusetts and bought a 300 acre farm with no money down, no payments for 3 years. "You only want 300?" the bank manager said, "how about 1000?"

"No," William Thomas Whitney replied, "300 ought to be plenty."

This may be one of the strangest tales I have ever brought to the table, Gentle Reader, and yet one of the most fundamental in describing the birth of our Bill of Rights...and most especially the Fourth Amendment.

As many of you know, the new FISA compromise may or may not allow warrantless wiretapping of American citizens on a wholesale scale.

Something you may not know is that a similar debate raged in England (centered around the right of Government to seize the papers of whomever they chose, and use the papers as evidence against those persons) during the reign of King George III—or that it involved scandalous sexual behavior, Benjamin Franklin, the 18th Century version of blogging, and two men who decided to take on the corruption of the Crown...and won.

And because of all that, we have a Fourth Amendment today.

Ready for a tale of liberty and ribaldry?
Then let’s plunge right in, shall we?

In 1789 France was greatest country in Europe. Wealthy, sophisticated, in the forefront of art, intellect and fashion, it was the paragon of western civilization. And all these achievements were despite a government of remarkable incompetence.

The French monarchy was an anachronism. It had modern pomp but medieval circumstances. The government had 18th century expenses and a 14th century income. A king, on the whims of his mistress, could plunge France into a calamitous war, but he could not raise the taxes to pay for it. The king did not have to answer for his vanity, lust, bigotry or mistakes; but he had to borrow the money for them.

The Crown had been bankrupt throughout most of the 18th century. Much of the treasury actually had been lost in a stock market crash of 1720. The monarchy simply borrowed money to meet its expenses and then borrowed more money to pay off its debts. The deficits grew but the monarchy continued its profligate ways.

From the plebian soldier's point of view, the social contract regarding wartime service isn't all that hard to comprehend.  Every generation or so, your country goes to war, with the tacit understanding that the government will: only compel you to bear arms for a limited time; compensate you in some way for your time and effort; and tend to any long-tem injuries sustained while fighting for the government's causes.  So it is that every generation or so, a group of veterans returns to the United States in full belief that the government which sent them into battle will care for their wounds and honor their service – and in nearly every case, find their naïve hopeful trust violated in the most unconscionable, unpatriotic ways.

Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight your resident historiorantologist will start looking at how that government treated some of the veterans of a war four generations removed from the Iraq Occupation.  Along the way, we'll take a look at a war message that doesn't seem to have lost much relevance – or many talking points – over the past 91 years.

Recently, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, Larry Sabato, wrote an article, called Time to Change the Unit Rule. In this article, he talks about a clause in the constitution that is virtually unknown. In the event that no presidential candidate emerges with a majority of electoral votes, the election for president is determined in the house. However, a majority of state delegations determines the president, not a majority of the members of the house. The state delegations all vote, and the majority vote in each delegation determines the way in which that delegation votes. Each delegation, regardless of size, gets one vote, and thus twenty six delegations are needed for a majority. Sabato's problem had to do with the fact that every state got the same single vote. The block voting concept, however, is the same as what the Electoral College uses. In effect, a 49% minority has no say, because the state, in both instances, votes as a block. This mechanism originated 2,500 years ago, at the dawn of the Roman Republic

[Crossposted from Progressive Historians]

Friday the 11th--known around the world as 7-11 Day--is my last day of teaching for this summer in my Teaching American History (TAH) grant. This is the first year of my third TAH grant, in which I serve as "content expert." This is a lofty term for someone who supposedly knows something about colonial and revolutionary America, and who teaches it to them during the summer Institutes. In the first grant, we had a mix of 5th, 8th, and 11th grade US history teachers. That was a disaster, as the content we brought to them on any given day was automatically not relevant to 1/3 of the teachers.

The second grant was 8th grade teachers, which is the first half of US history. The group was a mix of coaches and "regular" teachers. Great people. We all learned alot.

This newest group is fifth grade teachers. They also teach the first half, so we're focusing on colonial, revolutionary, and Civil War-era America.

This is directed to those who can no longer see themselves supporting Barack Obama for POTUS, and not to those who are merely upset or critical:

Which President in American history do you admire?  If your answer to that is "none", then allow me to rephrase the question: if the next POTUS had to be like one President in American history, which one would you prefer he be like?

Thanks for responding.

This Election already has been a historical one.      
And more history promises to be made.      
Numerous comparisons to past elections can be borne out by similarities.  

Hello Friend,
It's a rough time to be an American. In so many ways. Hardest perhaps is wrapping one's brain around the idea that we've become "2 kinds" of Americans- you know, the Red ones and the Blue ones. Just like a football game. There are many of us, myself included, that feel our flag has been hijacked somehow, huge SUV's ready to run you off the road have flag stickers on their bumpers, patriotism is being measured by whether or not one wears a flag pin (made in China, by the way,) on one's lapel. To disagree with an insane war fueled by rampant greed, to support our fighting men and women by wanting them back here where they belong has somehow come to mean one is with the enemy. And the idea has been put into our heads that dissent is unpatriotic, un-American. Dissent may be impolite, it may even be obnoxious, but it is decidedly neither unpatriotic nor un-American.
It's July 4th, 2008.

I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one-and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces.

Henry Ford -- 1903

One hundred years ago today, the first Ford Model Ts began production at Ford's Highland Park plant near Detroit.  Ford invented neither the combustion engine, the automobile, nor the assembly line, but the confluence of these three changed the face of the planet in both good ways and bad.

If you threw in something about Jews being bad, you could even say the above paragraph sums up the core of Ford's philosophy... and built into that philosophy you can find the sum of our great economy and the deficits of our mighty earth.

Those who hate FDR and what he stood for will hate this video. Among many other valuable ideas, it also contains oodles of rare historical political cartoons and movie footage.

It is about an hour and 45 minutes short.

My username is intended ironically as an allusion to my expectation that a "compromise candidate" will be projected into the convention in late August. Although it seems less likely at this time that it will be Bloomberg (whose policies I abhor), I still think the manipulating of the process toward the end of a so-called compromise candidate has been in the making for some time--but that is not the point of this video, which does not mention today's candidates.

One of the best things about being Canadian is that we get ringside seats to America without actually having to be a part of it.  Unless we want to, of course.

We watch your television shows.  We sit through your movies.   We choke down your fast food.  We buy your stuff, and we take your money when you buy ours.  Just how 'American' this makes us is the subject of much debate (here in Canada, at least - I'm sure none of you guys give it a second thought), but we're always happy to point and laugh and make the occasional suggestion.

Think of us as something between a nosey neighbour and a meddling sibling.