Andrew Leonard: Obama: The big-spending fiscal conservative. Basically an intro to David Leonhardt's New York Times Magazine essay on Obama's economic programs. I bring it up again because I wanted to add a couple more comments. One is that a lot of people have become confused over markets and capitalism, especially since the Communist collapse c. 1990. Markets enable the exchange of goods and services among large numbers of uncoordinated participants with price adjustments resolving differences between supply and demand. Markets work better in theory than in practice, mostly because in theory you can assume things like perfect information and rational behavior that do not exist in the real world. The failure of Soviet command economies, along with the conservative critique of distorted and inefficient effects in our own regulated markets, has led many people to market approaches to problems that had traditionally been subjected to bureaucratic regulation -- good examples of this are the cap-and-trade schemes for managing pollution externalities and auctions for divvying up commons resources like broadcast bandwidth. These schemes wind up being attractive both to the left and to the right, at least to segments of both that are not in thrall to moral absolutes.

One reason these schemes are attractive to (at least some of us on) the left is that markets are largely separable from capitalism. If you look at pro-capitalist propaganda over the last few decades, you'll see that much of what they're saying is really just pro-market, and nowadays that's relatively uncontroversial. Capitalism itself is fundamentally about the private ownership of capital, and if you look at that carefully you'll see that capitalists more often than not are at odds with free markets: capitalists seek to limit competition, to fix prices, to obscure and bias information, to maximize rents due to ownership. You'll also notice that many capitalists have invested heavily in lobbying, using their political influence to subsidize and distort markets. Given all this, it's possible for leftists to see markets as a means to undermine the worst aspects of capitalism. One more attractive thing about markets is that they limit the overshoot problems associated with seizing political power.

For various reasons, including his University of Chicago environs, Obama is hipper on markets than any other politician I can think of. He may be too much of a believer -- Robert Kuttner and others have done important work in showing cases where markets are dysfunctional, most obviously in health care -- but he is coming closer to promising economic solutions than anyone else I can think of. This also means he's way out in front of the masses in his thinking, which is going to make it difficult to explain and sell. Just to pick one example, much of the campaign to date has revolved around gas prices. McCain has a nice, simple story: cut consumer taxes, drill more wells, build more refineries, cut back on environmental regulations, get government out of the way and let the industry and the market bring prices back to normal. Problem is, none of these things will work, for reasons it would take a couple thousands of words to explain, but so far McCain's narrative is winning, partly because it sounds plausible, and partly because it's what people want to hear. Politically, Obama has to fit his more complex, more sophisticated, more nuanced narrative into a McCain-sized sound bite. Whether he can do so or not will be the real test of his skills as a politician, but he's operating under a major handicap: clearly, he knows better.

The only real political hope I have in this debate is that, while most Americans won't be able to grasp Obama's understanding of what needs to be done, they will at least shy away from McCain's canned cluelessness. They do, after all, have Bush's example of eight years of simplistic, flattering, market-tested bullshit assertions, and all the trouble they have caused.

Jacob Weisberg: If Obama Loses. Subhead: "Racism is the only reason McCain might beat him." That's probably true, although I for one am still worried about stupidity -- a more general, but not unrelated, ailment. At FiveThirtyEight, the popular vote poll projection currently favors Obama by a mere 0.1%, a fairly steady erosion from a peak lead of about 3% in mid-June. The peak occurred shortly after Obama clinched the nomination, so he picked up a bit of the shine that winners enjoy. Since then he's been subjected to a steady drip of innuendo, especially as the right wing noise machine has coalesced around a candidate they weren't all that fond of in the first place. You can argue that Obama is either under or over expectations -- that a black Democrat is doing as well as Obama is doing wasn't necessarily something you'd predict a year or two ago. One thing that's certain is that this will get nastier. I'm reminded of the two Jesse Helms-Harvey Gantt races, which both went to the white guy by narrow margins even though Helms by then was widely regarded as an embarrassment. On the other hand, Helms didn't carry North Carolina by much -- about the same edge McCain has in the polls now.

Glenn Greenwald: The right and men who live off their second wives' inherited wealth. John McCain and John Kerry have so much in common. They were both born into established and well-connected but not-especially-wealthy families. They both enlisted into the Vietnam War, both distinguishing themselves well enough to parlay their experiences into political careers. They both went on to marry very rich second wives. They both have checkered careers of principled demagoguery combined with flip-flops on nearly every issue they were once noted for. Both managed to be nominated by their parties for president. Hopefully, McCain will join Kerry in the loser's column. Kerry was excoriated for all of these traits during his 2004 run. McCain is due the same treatment. The media has lagged way behind on McCain -- I saw one survey recently showing that McCain had received favorable treatment in 47% of newspaper articles, compared to 28% favorable treatment of Obama -- but Greenwald has dug up a set of things that right-wing pundits said about Kerry's numerous houses and outrageous wealth, on the theory that one could and should offer McCain the same treatment. Greenwald's latest book is called Great American Hypocrites, so this seems to be right up his alley.

In fairness, we should note one difference between McCain and Kerry. While Kerry has often been eager to sign up for a war, he's also been known to change his mind once his war turns into a giant fiasco. On the other hand, McCain has never seen a war he didn't lust for, and he's never changed his mind about a war no matter how badly it turned out. Kerry has at least has shown some capacity to learn from his mistakes. As his flip-flops suggest, McCain is also adaptable, but he's got a blind love for war.

Andrew J Bacevich: The next president will disappoint you. That's more than likely, of course, especially in the foreign policy realm, which has been dominated by an enduring (to use a popular DOD euphemism for permanent) bipartisan clique that seem more dedicated to each other than any actual interests most Americans share.

To judge by the cadre of advisors they've recruited, neither candidate holds much affinity for outside-the-box thinkers. Obama's "national security working group," for example, consists chiefly of Democratic war horses, including former secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher and former national security advisor Anthony Lake -- a group that is not young, not charismatic and not known for innovative thinking.

McCain's national security team features a strong neoconservative presence, including pundits such as Max Boot and Robert Kagan, along with hawkish Washington insiders such as Randy Scheunemann and James Woolsey. All figured prominently among advocates of invading Iraq; none has yet to repent. Agents of change? Not likely, unless having a go at Iran qualifies as creative thinking.

But even among Bacevich's names, there are real partisan differences. The Obama (actually Clinton) list reads "same old, same old." The McCain list, on the other hand, are not just people who followed Bush into Iraq; they're people who tried hard to lead Bush into even more wars, people who grow even scarier advising the trigger-happy McCain. Bacevich is right that the Washington establishment limits what a president can do, and he's right that structural problems like "a looming crisis of debt and dependency" undermine American power. Under these circumstances, we could do far worse than see a return to the "same old, same old" Clinton regime.

Heather Havrilesky: I Like to Watch. Part of the column concerns HBO's Generation Kill:

But the most informative and unnerving aspect of Generation Kill may be its portrayal of the ways that civilians in Iraq have been thoroughly, heavily, repeatedly screwed by our invasion. The Marines can't help those who took up arms and joined the insurrection or keep them from being assassinated by Iraqi troops, despite pamphlets that promised the U.S. would protect them. They can't help the farmers who were robbed and stripped naked (some assassinated) by Iraqi soldiers. They can't help the crowds of civilians fleeing Baghdad as the bombs are falling, and they don't help the people in neighborhoods in Baghdad who need protection from bandits robbing them at night. It's no wonder this miniseries isn't a massive hit for HBO; watching it pounds home just how impossible Iraq was from the start, and just how difficult it's going to be for us to extract ourselves from that country without leaving its people high and dry in the middle of a raging civil war.

There are many such examples. Colbert makes a big point about using non-lethal force (smoke grenades as warning shots) at a roadblock, but a few moments later a soldier panics and kills an approaching driver. Colbert's reaction is to comfort and defend the soldier. Nor is that the first time. Nearly every attempt at scrupulous restraint is screwed up by someone up or down the line, and nobody is held accountable for anything. The effect is that the de facto Rules of Engagement is made by the lowest denominator. The mentality is inevitably colonial: the worst of us is always held above the best of them.

What this proves is what I've been saying all along: Americans, or for that matter anyone else, can't go to war without producing atrocities. That much is guaranteed by the training, the camaraderie, the weapons, the pecking order, the promotion system. To enter into a war without expecting the worse is purest negligence. It is one of the things most Americans understand least about themselves.