When the history of this strange and soon-to-be-concluded Democratic primary season is written, let it be noted that the candidate whose income was modest (in political-class terms) until his books became bestsellers was somehow framed as the representative of the elite — while the one who was able to dip into her own personal coffers to fund her campaign to the tune of $6 million succeeded, with a little help from the media, in casting herself as a woman of the people.

I’ve been spending a lot of time digging through the blogospheric record of 9/11. And it’s brought back some of my memories of those tense days and weeks — less tense in San Francisco, certainly, than in New York, but jittery nonetheless.

And I can’t help thinking, again, as I have before — on the one-year anniversary of the attacks, and again at the five-year milestone — how miserably the U.S. has fared in pursuing its interests since the towers fell. President Bush had a good first couple weeks (after a bad first couple of days), followed by an awful rest of the decade.

In the days after 9/11, we didn’t know whether there were more attacks in line. There was anthrax in the mail and fear in the air.

But we also had a measure of political unity, unthinkable now; an outpouring of good will from around the world; and a national resolve to bring the 9/11 perpetrators to justice.

If you could somehow send a messenger from today back to that packed joint session of Congress that Bush addressed on Sept. 20, 2001, Joe Future would have to say something like this:

“I’m sorry to tell you that, nearly seven years later, you won’t have captured Osama bin Laden. You’re going to have a big scare about anthrax-tainted letters, but you’ll never find out who sent them. You’re going to depose the Taliban only to let them survive and prosper. You’re going to invade Iraq, commit America to a disastrous open-ended occupation, and give the Islamists a whole new banner to recruit under. You’re going to bankrupt the Treasury, trample the Constitution, and drag the name of the U.S. through the mud.”

Such a prospect would, of course, have been unfathomable.

UPDATE: I didn’t even realize when I posted this last night that today is the fifth anniversary of Bush’s hubris-laden “Mission Accomplished” stage show. Thanks to Amos in the comments for pointing out.

Here’s a fascinating story from Jay Rosen about the Off the Bus blogger who first reported on Obama’s “bitter in Pennsylvania” comments.

It turns out, as so many important stories do, to be far more complex and nuanced than anything you’re likely to have heard on TV or in the papers, which mostly preferred not to name the story’s source: Mayhill Fowler, an Obama supporter who has been blogging for Off the Bus (a collaboration between Huffington Post and Rosen’s NewAssignment, for which I have served as an adviser in the past).

Fowler attended Obama’s San Francisco fundraiser. Traditionally, the press has not reported on what candidates say at private fundraisers. Fowler seemed blur the roles of “supporter” and “reporter” well enough that she got access to the event without ever being asked not to cover it.

Rosen talks about how “uncharted” the campaign terrain is today, with no clear boundaries separating those participating in the campaign from those covering the campaign. In the New York Times, Katherine Seelye asks, “Is it possible to straddle the line between reporter and supporter?”

Fowler’s story answers that question pretty definitively. Of course it’s possible. The fixed roles of the old campaign drama are dissolving. Everyone’s improvising. The bad news is that a lot of people are confused. The good news is that a lot more people can participate — and hear what’s said behind previously closed doors.

If you are a politician speaking to a crowd — any crowd — you should pretty much assume that everything you say can and will be broadcast to the world. That’s the lesson that George Allen learned, and it’s one Obama should know, too.

Apparently some Obama supporters feel that bloggers should be understood to be “activists” not “journalists,” and that Fowler betrayed their cause:

Bloggers are viewed as activists, not journalists. It’ s why some campaigns have blogger conference calls and press conference calls. The blogger calls are to pump up the base. The press calls are to do spin and answer arguably tough questions. She was admitted to the private San Francisco fund-raiser as an activist blogger and then functioned as a journalist.

This strikes me as one of those distinctions that is untenable. Some bloggers are activists, some are journalists; some are diarists, some are businesspeople. Saying you’re “a blogger” doesn’t make you an activist or a journalist or anything else; all it means is that you’re someone who posts stuff on the Web. Since the Web is public, this practice has a natural slope, a gravitational pull; things roll naturally from the private to the public.

So, yes, on the Web the “line between supporter and reporter” has been smudged out. One result, this week, is that Obama’s campaign has suffered a setback — and as an Obama supporter, I might be mildly disappointed. But, far more importantly, as a journalist I’m happy to see more and more of the previously curtained elements of our election process brought forth into view. Ultimately, it’s better for everyone to know what Obama said at his fundraiser.

But now we’ve only heard from one of three candidates. Next, let’s turn on the mikes in the rooms where Hillary Clinton is talking to her backers. And let’s listen in on John McCain wooing those wary evangelicals!

During each election season, most days, each campaign runs a daily conference call with the media. These calls are the candidates’ equivalent of the White House “presser” — not real press conferences with the candidates or the president himself, but rather check-ins between the campaigns’ (or the White House’s) press handlers and the reporters.

I don’t know exactly when this practice started, but it’s been standard for a while. The calls are “on the record”; the campaigns are trying to get their messages out, to push and shove coverage in the direction they wish to see it go. But they’re not exactly public, or at least they haven’t been. If you were an everyday citizen — or, for that matter, say, a blogger — you mostly didn’t have a chance to listen in. You couldn’t actually hear what the campaigns were saying; you had to hear the reporters’ takes on what the campaigns said, and maybe a snippet of recorded material.

In the old days this might have been tenable. Today we’ve got this Internet thing that forces a nice clean line between the private and the public. Today, something is either truly private — limited to a very few — or it’s fully and irrevocably public. The grey zone is gone.

Dave Winer recently started trying to rustle up each day’s calls from each campaign and post them as MP3s. He argues, persuasively to me, that voters have the right to hear these on-the-record events first-hand if they want to — just as the White House pressers are now televised, online and transcribed. Sure, you could argue that most people have neither the time nor the interest to tune in to this stuff every day. And you’d be right. But that’s still no argument to keep them out of the hands of anyone who does want them. They are the primary source material, and it’s always good to have a chance to check what we read in the paper and see on the screen against the original.

From what I can tell, the trouble Winer has had in getting access to the material each day hasn’t been a matter of anyone trying to keep a big lid on the calls — some of them get posted already. It’s more a case of old-school journalistic professionalism, of a lingering “this is backstage stuff, no need for the public to listen in” attitude, and of a cave-in to convenience. The campaigns can’t invite a million bloggers on the call, so they draw the line that’s familiar and easy: they say, if you want to get on our e-mail list with the daily call info, you need credentials. And apparently no one with the credentials has yet stepped forward to provide the calls to Winer or the wider Web. Too bad.

There’s a parallel here to the institution of corporate earnings calls: they used to be accessible only to handpicked analysts and reporters; today, it’s still mostly those folks asking the questions, but the calls get posted online for all to hear.

I think it’s inevitable that the campaign calls will, too. It would be nice for that to happen before this critical election passes too many more milestones.

Because I’m on the road I didn’t get to listen to Obama’s Tuesday speech until last night. I’d heard a mixture of reactions to it already — from one friend’s “best political speech of my lifetime” to another’s “not sure he put the controversy to rest.”

So I fired up the browser and tuned in.

First thing I realized: this is one lengthy piece of substantive political argument! After two terms of an incoherent chief executive and a couple decades of soundbite-driven political culture, it felt anachronistic yet oddly invigorating to settle in and realize that I was in for nearly 40 minutes of a well-constructed speech with a long sweep. Obama did not, as Dave Winer put it, “take the shortcuts.” The high road is also, sometimes, a long road.

Second thing I realized: Obama is not only a “great speaker” in the sense that his voice can soar and he can fire up a crowd; he is also able to summon more than one effective style. For most of this speech on race, he ditched the grand oratory and hit calm, somewhat informal, conversational notes: he was like your incredibly articulate friend across a dinner table, going deep into a political argument by increasingly personal anecdotes, gradually getting more passionate as the minutes pass.

Finally, I realized that the speech was a big gamble. As Jay Rosen wrote, it was a challenge to the media — a gauntlet thrown down at the cable networks’ reductive, infinite-loop approach to complex issues. But it was even more a challenge to his audience, to all of us, to listen with less impatience, to think for one moment a little less about the short strokes of one presidential race and a little more about the long arc of our national story.

In substance the speech was deeply pragmatic: It called on the groups that make up the American polis to stop objectifying one another because that simply distracts us from our opportunity to solve some big problems. That’s a practical argument: stop fighting because we’ve got work to do.

The speech’s idealism lay rather on a kind of meta level. In its length, its willingness to delve into history, its plea for us to embrace the complexities of our present conflicts by understanding their roots, it implicitly rejected the dominant mode of American political discourse since Ronald Reagan transformed it in 1980. Yes, Obama’s speech contained anecdotes. Yes, it contained soundbites. But these were the building blocks of something larger and more consequential.

Yes, Obama told us, we can have a political conversation informed by intelligence and nuance and a sense of history. We are not doomed to live forever in the Bush administration’s universe of stunted understanding, or the cable networks’ academy of closed minds.

Is he right? Will his gamble pay off? I’d like to think so. But it might be the most audacious hope of all.

UPDATE: Nick Kristof in the Times starts off with the same point — calling the speech “an acknowledgment of complexity, nuance and legitimate grievances on many sides” — before veering off in a different direction. (Hadn’t read him before I wrote this…)

Dave Winer asked to talk with me for a few minutes this morning for a primary post-mortem. (Actually, post mortem is entirely the wrong term in this case, since both candidates’ campaigns are alive and kicking hard.) His post is here, and here’s a link to the audio.

Here’s something I mentioned that hasn’t gotten much media attention yet but will, I think, in coming months. One criterion that seems to have emerged in this election, thanks to Hillary’s ads, is, “Who do you want answering the White House phone at 3 AM?” Hillary says, “Trust me, you know I can handle it better than Obama.” Personally I don’t buy that. But the really important point is that, whichever of them ends up as the Democratic candidate, John McCain is going to step forward and tell Americans that he’s their 3 AM man.

This image of McCain as a figure of stability and trust is pure fiction. Just Google “McCain temper” and you’ll find a litany of observations from members of his own party that he is “irrational.” Former conservative Republican congressman John LeBoutillier has said, “I think he is mentally unstable and not fit to be president.”

I doubt there’s much evidence to go that far. But McCain’s temper is legendary. This apparently has nothing to do with his experience as a POW (which, according to some accounts, actually helped teach him to deal with a temper that had been even more volcanic before). It’s just part of his personality and leadership style.

I’ve worked for bulging-veined bosses. (Though not, fortunately, in a long time.) And I don’t want one running the country.

As of around 7:30 pm California time here on Super Tuesday night, a look at the New York Times web site shows a remarkable pattern in the Democratic primaries:

As you can see, Obama wins the states up until “M”; Hillary wins from M through Z. (If you can’t see, click the picture for a full-sized image.)

If the pattern holds, the Obama folks may have a big win in California on the way.

This is about as reliable as the numerology that sometimes passes for market-timing prediction on Wall Street. But, hey, it’s a pattern!

This year we Democrats are in a rare and lucky position: we’ve got two good candidates to choose from. On Tuesday, I’m voting for Obama over Hillary. But in November, I’ll be happy to vote for either of them.

Right now, my preference is based on the following considerations:

Pressing the reset button internationally. After the last eight years, the U.S. needs to start over with the rest of the world. It’s hard to remember today, but there was a brief moment after 9/11 when the whole world was behind the U.S. What that moment called for was a unity government — and indeed, a diplomacy of global unity. Bush threw all that away in a blaze of arrogant partisanship and a go-it-alone rush to a misbegotten war. In the process he wrecked his own reputation and the nation’s.

Obama’s in a position to clear the decks and press “reset” with all of the strategic goofs and moral gaffes of the last eight years — and he’s in a better position to do so than Hillary. He was against the Iraq war, unequivocally, from day one. His briefer sojourn in the Beltway means there’s more of a chance he’ll be willing to try new approaches.

The Muslim factor. Obama’s time spent abroad, including his familiarity with Indonesia’s Muslim culture, has led to a scurrilous whisper campaign against him, suggesting that he’s Muslim himself. (Hey, change one letter of his name and you get Osama!) It’s a lie, but lies have been known to turn elections.

It seems certain to me that if Obama is the candidate, he’ll have to confront this lie directly at some point. More importantly, I think he can turn it around to his advantage. Because at this moment in history, we could really use a person in the White House who actually knows something about Muslim culture and society.

As we struggle to defeat Al Qaeda and its sympathizers, we need to carry the conflict back to the hearts and minds of the moderate Muslim world, which Bush — through policy errors, strategic blindness and moral failures — has ceded to our enemies. Obama represents a rare opportunity to reclaim this ground.

Electability. Hillary Clinton is a known factor to the American electorate. She has a lot of support. But it’s hard for me to see how she’s going to get too much more than she has today. And while this year’s GOP is comatose, her face remains one of the few stimuli that could conceivably cause the Republican right to hold its nose and vote for McCain.

Obama is simply a wild card. It could be that large numbers of white Americans will smile and nod and, in the privacy of the voting booth, decide not to support a black man. I think it’s worth testing that legacy against contemporary reality.

In the primaries so far, Obama’s been rallying young and disaffected voters back into the voting booth. That could make a huge difference in November: rather than limiting a Democratic campaign to a desperate hunt for one point over the 50-50 line that has marked Bush-era politics, Obama’s new throngs could tip the election in a stalemate-breaking way. It’s hard to see how Hillary could manage that.

Positive vibration. It’s hard to remember any political campaign as relentlessly upbeat as Obama’s, or as unwilling to sling mud. That’s part of his success story, and, evidently, part of his personality. It has worked beautifully to date, and it might work all the way through the election. But it worries me a bit.

When the GOP turns the slime machine on full blast, will Obama be able to deflect or defeat it? We just don’t know. Maybe his charisma will pull through; maybe he’ll show the charm and grace that Kerry just couldn’t muster and, with smiles and deft one-liners, sidestep the crap that will surely fly at him and defang the attack dogs.

But the hard-earned conventional political wisdom of the last decade is that when they come at you swinging slurs, your only choice is to hit back hard and fast. That doesn’t seem to be Obama’s way. And it’s a little troubling for any Democrat to contemplate a candidate who isn’t ready to rumble.

Still, I’ve always believed in voting one’s hopes over one’s fears!

The president and Congress are falling all over each other to hand money out to Americans in some vague hope that we will spend it and thus avert a recession. Economists tell us that the only people who actually spend these “rebates” are people who are poor enough that a few hundred dollars makes a big difference to them. Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration is not interested in giving money away to poor people. The only way Bush can stomach the notion of giving people money is to call it a “tax rebate,” so, as in 2001, tax rebates are what we are going to get.

An op-ed by a behavioral psychologist in today’s Times reports his research demonstrating that when you give people money and call it a “rebate” they don’t spend it. When we hear “rebate” we think we’re getting back money we already spent, and we’re most likley to sock it away. On the other hand, if you call it a “bonus,” our wallets open — it feels like found money and can fuel a splurge.

It would indeed make sense to call the sort of bales-of-bills-out-of-helicopters stimulus that Congress and the president support a “bonus.” But then Bush and his party couldn’t clothe their handout in the protective coloration of a “tax cut.” “Bonus” sounds too close to what’s really going on — the government handing some cash to its citizens — and such forthrightness has certainly not been a Washington priority during the past seven years.

This is politics, not economics, and it matters far more to the Bush administration than the minor issue of whether or not the measure actually achieves its goal of boosting consumer spending.

“Bonus” also carries echoes of a distant time when Army veterans thronged the capital demanding that the government make good on its promises while banks collapsed and markets panicked.

And nobody in either party wants to think about that. They are fortunate, in any case, that the Depression is receding from living memory, and few Americans have studied its history.

I know I linked to it yesterday, but that just wasn’t enough.

If you want to understand the world economy today, and what has happened during the last decade between the U.S. and China, amd how the Chinese have ended up holding $1.4 trillion, you need to sit down and read James Fallows’ piece in the new Atlantic. (In the time between the piece’s research and its publication that number jumped to $1.53 trillion, Fallows reports on his blog — another reason you should read the piece!)

This is a topic of sufficient complexity that most of us have very little hope of understanding it, yet Fallows lays it out with care and clarity. Here are a handful of key passages, offered primarily to get you to click on the link to the full piece, because that’s what you should do:

Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus — $1.4 trillion and counting, going up by about $1 billion per day — that the Chinese government has mostly parked in U.S. Treasury notes. In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China. Like so many imbalances in economics, this one can’t go on indefinitely, and therefore won’t. But the way it ends — suddenly versus gradually, for predictable reasons versus during a panic — will make an enormous difference to the U.S. and Chinese economies over the next few years, to say nothing of bystanders in Europe and elsewhere…

Neither government likes to draw attention to this arrangement, because it has been so convenient on both sides. For China, it has helped the regime guide development in the way it would like — and keep the domestic economy’s growth rate from crossing the thin line that separates “unbelievably fast” from “uncontrollably inflationary.” For America, it has meant cheaper iPods, lower interest rates, reduced mortgage payments, a lighter tax burden. But because of political tensions in both countries, and because of the huge and growing size of the imbalance, the arrangement now shows signs of cracking apart…

So why is China shipping its money to America? An economist would describe the oddity by saying that China has by far the highest national savings in the world. This sounds admirable, but when taken to an extreme — as in China — it indicates an economy out of sync with the rest of the world, and one that is deliberately keeping its own people’s living standards lower than they could be…

This is the bargain China has made — rather, the one its leaders have imposed on its people. They’ll keep creating new factory jobs, and thus reduce China’s own social tensions and create opportunities for its rural poor. The Chinese will live better year by year, though not as well as they could. And they’ll be protected from the risk of potentially catastrophic hyperinflation, which might undo what the nation’s decades of growth have built. In exchange, the government will hold much of the nation’s wealth in paper assets in the United States, thereby preventing a run on the dollar, shoring up relations between China and America, and sluicing enough cash back into Americans’ hands to let the spending go on.

So what’s the problem? There are several. One is that the U.S. has set up a tough situation for itself if it finds itself in conflict with China some time in the future.

Whatever the provocation, China would consider its levers and weapons and find one stronger than all the rest — one no other country in the world can wield. Without China’s billion dollars a day, the United States could not keep its economy stable or spare the dollar from collapse.

Would the Chinese use that weapon? The reasonable answer is no, because they would wound themselves grievously, too. Their years of national savings are held in the same dollars that would be ruined; in a panic, they’d get only a small share out before the value fell. Besides, their factories depend on customers with dollars to spend.

But that “reassuring” answer is actually frightening. Lawrence Summers calls today’s arrangement “the balance of financial terror,” and says that it is flawed in the same way that the “mutually assured destruction” of the Cold War era was.

I think you’d better just go read the rest now.